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Saudi Basic Industries Corp. v. Mobil Yanbu Petrochemical Co.1/14/2005
atute was not the New Jersey statute but the Delaware three-year statute of limitations. Rejecting that argument, this Court held that Delaware's borrowing statute would be applied in order to enforce New Jersey's "built in" two-year limitations period:
If a non-resident chooses to bring a foreign cause of action into Delaware for enforcement, he must bring the foreign statute of limitations along with him if the foreign statute prescribes a shorter time than the domestic statute. Our statute does not apply to a resident of this State suing on a foreign cause of action provided he was a resident when the cause of action arose. As to such a resident the common law rule that the lex fori governs the matter of limitations of actions is left in full force.
Although the plaintiff in Pack was a resident of Delaware, this Court recognized that a literal application of the second sentence of Delaware's borrowing statute to that particular plaintiff would extend, rather than shorten, the applicable limitations period. This Court declined to apply the borrowing statute in such a literal way, because to do so would undercut the overriding purpose of borrowing statutes, which is "to prevent shopping for the most favorable forum." Because the two-year limitations period was "built in" to New Jersey's statutory cause of action for wrongful death, this Court applied Delaware's borrowing statute so as to "enforce the New Jersey law as we find it."
The sane reasoning that led this Court to eschew a literal application of the borrowing statute in Pack, requires us to uphold the reasoning of, and the result reached by, the trial court in this case. Here, ExxonMobil's claims arose under Saudi law, which imposes no time bar upon those claims. If ExxonMobil had prosecuted their overcharge claims in Saudi Arabia, their claims would not be time-barred. But ExxonMobil did not assert these claims in Saudi Arabia, or bring suit in Delaware as plaintiff to enforce those claims against SABIC. Rather, it was SABIC who came to Delaware to obtain an adjudication that (inter alia) Delaware's three year statute of limitations barred ExxonMobil's claims. Given the nature of SABIC's affirmative claim for declaratory relief, ExxonMobil was entitled to assert its overcharge causes of action as counterclaims for damages. In these circumstances, as the trial judge found, the party that was "shopping for the most favorable forum" was SABIC, not ExxonMobil.
The trial judge recognized that to apply the borrowing statute to ExxonMobil would subvert the statute's fundamental purpose, by enabling SABIC to prevail on a limitations defense that would never have been available to it had the overcharge claims been brought in the jurisdiction where the cause of action arose, i.e., Saudi Arabia. Because the Superior Court properly ruled that the borrowing statute did not apply, it follows that that court also correctly held that ExxonMobil's counterclaims to recover the royalty overcharges were not time-barred.
(b) The Application of The Tolling Statute
The conclusion that ExxonMobil's counterclaims were not time-barred was correct for a second, independent reason. Even if the borrowing statute did apply and thereby triggered Delaware's three-year statute of limitations, Delaware's tolling statute stopped the running of the three-year statute until SABIC filed this action in Delaware and as a result, became amenable to service of process. Our tolling statute provides:
If at the time when a cause of action accrues against any person, such person is out of the State, the action may be commenced, within the time limited therefor in this chapter, after such person comes into the Sta
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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