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Saudi Basic Industries Corp. v. Mobil Yanbu Petrochemical Co.1/14/2005
consider worthwhile. In other words, under the Saudi legal system, Delaware Rule of Evidence 403 has no place. Here, the Court exercised its discretion in determining not only what the Saudi law is, but how it should be explained to the jury. Obviously, many of the concepts of Saudi Arabian law are not easily understandable to a U.S. judge, much less a lay person in the United States. The Court in this case attempted to set forth the elements of the tort and convey to the jury in a clear, understandable manner the circumstances under which ghasb damages would be awardable. The Court could not present to the jury every conceivable circumstance under which ghasb damages could be awarded, nor could it tell the jury...that it is "rare" for juries to award damages for ghasb.. The factors Mr. Wolfson suggested are factors that a judge could analyze. The factors invite considerations that an American jury would not be permitted to consider, such as "a desire to find the middle ground between competing litigants," in other words, a compromise verdict or a consideration of the consequences of the jury verdict. Factor 5 may have prompted the jury to balance ExxonMobil's right to recover any wrongfully taken principal amounts against the possibility of undue hardship to SABIC. Such an instruction would invite inappropriate considerations by the jury having no place in deliberations and encourage the jury to engage in endless speculation about the "possible" undue hardship that SABIC might experience if ordered to pay damages. In addition, the Court was concerned that Factor 2 impermissibly injected into the case the issue of statute of limitations which the Court had ruled pretrial was contrary to Saudi law. To suggest to the jury that ExxonMobil's delay could be considered.when deciding whether or not to award damages for usurpation flies in the face of the Saudi substantive law which provides that property rights are eternal and cannot be extinguished by the passage of time.
On appeal, SABIC argues that even if the trial court correctly refused to grant judgment to SABIC as a matter of law, the court should nonetheless have granted SABIC a new trial, because the jury was given no guidance on how to properly exercise its otherwise unfettered discretion. Given the difficult circumstances that confronted the trial judge, we cannot conclude that her jury instructions relating to ghasb, however succinct, subjected SABIC to any injustice that warrants reversal.
The jury was not given unbridled authority to do whatever it wished. The trial judge plainly instructed the jurors that they could not find for ExxonMobil unless "SABIC wrongfully exercised ownership or possessory rights over [their] property.without consent, which means with blatant or reckless disregard for those property rights." That is, the jury was told that SABIC's state of mind and conduct must have been far more culpable than an inadvertent breach of contract.
The jury was also instructed that they could, but need not, award additional damages beyond damages for breach of contract if they concluded that SABIC had committed ghasb. And, if, in that event, the jury made a discretionary decision to award additional damages, the trial judge cabined that discretion by limiting any additional award to "any profits you may determine SABIC derived by using in its operations the money, if any, that was usurped." These instructions flowed from the trial judge's legal determination, based upon Saudi law principles well grounded in the expert testimony that she accepted, that if the jury found that SABIC committed ghasb as she defined it, an award of damages so limited would do justice.
If the trial judge, based upon the identical re
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Delaware Personal Injury Attorneys
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