Amy Roebuck Frey by Joyce Hanson

Rising Star: King & Spalding's Amy Roebuck Frey By Joyce Hanson

Law360 (July 30, 2020, 3:16 PM EDT) -- Amy Roebuck Frey of King & Spalding LLP helped win one of the largest Energy Charter Treaty arbitral awards ever, at $535 million, for investor Anatolie Stati in an oil and gas dispute against Kazakhstan, landing her among the international arbitration practitioners under age 40 honored as Law360 Rising Stars.

ON HER RELOCATION TO PARIS: Frey began her law career in Houston with Atlanta-headquartered King & Spalding, but the American has called Paris home for a decade and earned a master's degree in international human rights law from the University of Oxford.

A member of the bar in Texas, Washington, D.C., and Paris, Frey has focused predominantly on investor-state disputes over the course of a 14-year career that has been spent at the cross-section of international arbitration, public international law and European law. She said her current caseload consists of 20 Energy Charter Treaty cases against the likes of Spain, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria for more than a dozen energy clients.

"When I joined the firm, we didn't have a Paris office," Frey said. "Our international arbitration practice group was based primarily out of our Houston office and doing a lot of disputes with Latin American clients Amy Roebuck Frey and countries." King & Spalding

Frey said she first moved her practice to D.C. about four years after Age: 38 she started with the firm, when her husband got a job in the area. Home base: Paris Around then, she started working on a case based in Europe alongside Position: Partner lead partner Ken Fleuriet and spent a lot of time traveling there. Law school: Tulane University Coincidentally, she said, King & Spalding was at the time planning to Law School expand its European presence, and Fleuriet founded the Paris office that Frey was asked to join. First job after law school: Associate at King & "Through that collaboration, we discussed the possibility of me Spalding

moving over," Frey said. "I was an associate at the time in 2011 and they needed associates in Paris. I jumped at the opportunity to make the move."

Frey and her husband moved together to Paris and had children there. They are now 2 and 5 years old.

"We're pretty much settled in Paris for the long term," she said. "It's one of King & Spalding's smallest offices, and I'm a link between our home offices in the U.S. and our efforts to grow internationally in Europe."

ON THE NATURE OF INVESTOR-STATE DISPUTES: Frey has represented investors in claims against Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Kazakhstan and Venezuela, in cases brought under bilateral investment treaties and multilateral treaties. Her cases involve tax and tariff disputes related to customs duties on imports, changes to corporate income tax regimes, transport pricing, and taxes on the export of oil and gas, according to the firm.

"I specialize in investor-state disputes, focusing almost exclusively on investment treaty disputes," she said. "That area of law is fairly unique and has its own body of law. It's not an area of law where you have binding precedent. That's the nature of arbitration."

In 2016, Frey worked with a global legal team who convinced a tribunal that an onerous levy by Ecuador on Murphy Oil Corp.'s output wasn't simply a tax but a coercive policy. King & Spalding's international arbitration practice was named that year among Law360's Practice Groups of the Year, with Frey getting a mention for helping Murphy snag a win from the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which told Ecuador to pay the oil company at least $31 million for imposing a 99% crude oil levy that forced the company to sell its stake in a drilling consortium at an unfairly low price.

"Each case is decided on its own merits, and an arbitral tribunal is not bound by the decisions of other arbitral tribunals, although we may be guided by them," Frey said. "In some ways, you're arguing less about 'this is what the law says and this is the way it has to be' than about 'this is what justice requires and this is what should be.' Because of that, you really feel like you're part of developing a legal system or jurisprudence."

ONE OF HER BIGGEST CASES: In one of Frey's largest cases, the King & Spalding partner served as counsel to oil and gas production facility owner Anatolie Stati in securing an arbitral award of $535 million against Kazakhstan under the Energy Charter Treaty.

The Stockholm tribunal's award, issued in 2013, stemmed from arbitrators' finding that Kazakhstan subjected Stati's investments to "coordinated harassment" before seizing the petroleum operations in 2010 and transferring them to the state-owned oil company KazMunayGas.

"My client bought a dilapidated oil and gas company in Kazakhstan, refurbished it and believed he could find oil in the ground where others had not," Frey said. "He discovered oil, and soon after that discovery, the Kazakhstan government took over his company and kicked him out of the country and jailed his in- country manager on false pretenses."

The case dealt not only with the government's mistreatment of Stati's business but also the denial of justice for his in-country manager, a Moldovan citizen who found himself sitting in Kazakh jails for many

years "for a crime that was a complete fabrication," Frey said.

"The arbitration itself wasn't about getting him out of jail — he was released before arbitration ended, which was a positive — but it was just one element of how far a country may go in mistreating foreigners," she said. "Thankfully, we prevailed in securing a favorable award for our clients."

Stati's King & Spalding legal team has continued to fight Kazakhstan in a multijurisdictional battle as the country seeks to avoid paying the award. Within the past year, Stati has secured a massive $22.6 billion legal attachment from the Belgian courts over assets of Kazakhstan's National Fund, and the country has sought to escape the attachment in a virtual trial in a U.K. civil proceeding.

HER PROUDEST MOMENT: Frey takes pride in the case she was working on when she decided to move to Paris. The dispute brought against Romania by investor Ioan Micula, his twin brother Viorel, and three of their companies resulted in a $250 million arbitral award favoring them in 2013 from a three-member tribunal constituted under International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes rules.

The Miculas, who are Romanian by birth but fled to Sweden during the Ceauşescu regime and became Swedish citizens, returned to Romania after the fall of communism in 1989 and built a food and beverage manufacturing platform there at Romania's invitation as it was developing into a democracy and a new nation, Frey said.

"These twin brothers moved back to their home region, which was a very rural part of Romania," Frey said. "They built from scratch a state-of-the-art, Swedish technology-informed food and beverage investment platform that started with a soft drink and bottled water business, then expanded to a food production line and a brewery."

But the incentive program the Romanian government put into place so the country could accede to the European Union turned sour even though Romania was trying to develop sufficiently to hit EU political and economic targets, Frey said.

"My clients expanded their platforms based on these incentives," she said. "It was supposed to be a 10- year program, but five years into it Romania cut the program prematurely."

Brought by the Miculas under the Sweden-Romania bilateral investment treaty, the case and the enforcement saga that ensued have become a bellwether for more recent cases involving intra-EU disputes and issues of EU state aid law, according to Frey.

Though she has helped secure larger monetary awards, she said the Micula dispute was a profound experience for her as a young lawyer, as she went "head-to-head with formidable opponents" at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, one of King & Spalding's top competitors in the field.

Frey added that she's proud of the case because she connected with the people involved.

"I got to know the clients and spent weeks in Romania visiting them and understanding how their businesses worked and what their work ethic was," Frey recalled. "I knew our clients were right. We were right on the law, but also we were right because they had done something really good but had been treated unfairly."

HOW SHE SEES HER FIELD CHANGING IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS: In investor-state disputes, Frey said she often sees to what extent a government can be bound by the commitments it has made to a market, investors or an individual. She predicts that questions around governments' trustworthiness will cause changes in her field of practice over the next 10 years.

"There's talk already of forming a permanent arbitration court in Europe to handle these types of disputes so that there's a bit more permanency in the arbitrators and the judges," Frey said. "It's a little hard to predict exactly what will happen, but because there are continuous calls for reform, I think that you can be certain it won't look the same in 10 years."

— As told to Joyce Hanson

Law360's Rising Stars are attorneys under 40 whose legal accomplishments belie their age. A team of Law360 editors selected the 2020 Rising Stars winners after reviewing more than 1,300 submissions. Attorneys had to be under 40 as of April 30, 2020, to be eligible for this year's award. This interview has been edited and condensed.