MUMBAI : Tata Power has run into another legal wall in Singapore, where a court just knocked down its bid to overturn a $490.32 million arbitration award tied to a coal-mining opportunity in Russia that went south more than a decade ago.
The Singapore International Commercial Court threw out all three applications the company filed against the arbitration rulings. Tata Power has 28 days from August 26 to take this to the Singapore Court of Appeal, and it’s already said it plans to.
The roots of this fight go back to 2013, when investment firm Kleros Capital Partners came to Tata Power with a possible joint bid on a coal deposit in Russia’s Kamchatka region. Both sides signed agreements meant to keep confidential information locked down and stop either party from cutting the other out of the deal. That partnership eventually fell apart. Tata Power went ahead and pursued the mining opportunity anyway, through its Russian subsidiary FENR, which secured a 25-year mining licence in January 2018.
The company later decided the project simply wasn’t commercially worth pursuing and handed the licence back. Kleros saw it differently, arguing Tata Power had leaned on shared confidential information and shut them out of an opportunity they’d explored together from the start.
Kleros took the fight to arbitration in Singapore in November 2020. The tribunal tackled liability first, and in September 2023, all three arbitrators agreed Tata Power had breached the agreements, on confidentiality, on non-circumvention, and on good faith.
The financial reckoning came later: in July 2025, a majority of the panel ordered Tata Power to pay Kleros $490.32 million, its calculated value of the lost opportunity.
Tata Power pushed back hard against that number in Singapore’s courts, arguing the arbitration had botched key questions around causation, how big the actual loss was, and whether it had been properly mitigated. The company also raised red flags over alleged ties between tribunal members and the third-party funder bankrolling Kleros’ case. None of it stuck. The court found no breach of natural justice, no procedural failure, and dismissed the bias claims outright.
Here’s the thing worth being clear about: this ruling doesn’t hand down a fresh $490 million penalty. That figure was already locked in back in 2025. What actually shifted on August 26 is Tata Power’s legal footing, its shot at getting the award scrapped just failed at this stage. And the real number owed could end up considerably higher than the headline figure suggests.
The award carries 5.33 percent simple interest annually, running from November 30, 2020, right up until Tata Power actually pays. On top of that, the company was ordered to cover Kleros’ legal costs, including roughly S$8.29 million, with interest stacking on parts of that too.
Kleros itself claims the running total, principal plus interest plus costs, has already crossed $640 million. That’s Kleros’ own math, not a fresh figure handed down by the court, but the gap matters: according to report, the base award sits around ₹4,600-4,700 crore at current exchange rates, while anything past $640 million would push well beyond ₹6,000 crore.Zoom out, and Tata Power’s overall business dwarfs this dispute.
The company runs operations spanning power generation, transmission, distribution, renewables and solar manufacturing, with total operational and under-construction capacity topping 26 GW. Its June quarter numbers looked solid too, consolidated net profit up nearly 11 percent to ₹1,175.93 crore, revenue climbing 5.63 percent to ₹19,051.26 crore.
Markets reacted almost instantly. Tata Power shares dropped around 4 percent during Thursday’s trading, briefly touching ₹349 after closing the previous session at ₹364.
