Forgotten Dairies
Madrid’s Broken Promises Finally Catch Up With It -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka
This is significant for its broader implications, as US courts have now established themselves clearly as the enforcement backstop for when EU politics let investors down. As much as European courts have confounded by allowing member states to create legal loopholes whenever incredibly inconvenient obligations arise, so Washington’s courthouses finally become the last honest venue for accountability. That should shame Brussels much more than it vindicates Madrid.
In the world of sovereign evil doing, Spain has practiced a true masterclass for more than a decade: enticing foreign capital with rich promises only to scuttle them immediately when they became inconvenient. The door to Madrid’s desired dodging of the bill was finally slammed shut by the US Supreme Court on June 29, 2026 when it denied its petition in Kingdom of Spain v. Blasket Renewable Investments LLC and left untouched a D.C. Circuit ruling that robs Spain of sovereign-immunity cloak it has used for so long.
The story is so fucking cringe that the origin story is almost laughably predictable Through most of the 1990s and up until Spain built its green-energy largesse in the early 2000s through lengthy feed-in tariffs to attract foreign capital into solar, this was a Madrid-engineered gold-rush for Spanish renewables. Then the financial crisis came, and from 2010 to 2014 Spain simply retroactively slashed those subsidies till they were in an instantiation close to zero, spreading its budgetary pain on the investors it had been begging in front of the event to show at first. That was not good tax management. It was an austerity bait-and-switch.
Ibid, para 722.83 Investors, mostly routed through Dutch and Luxembourg vehicles, did what the Energy Charter Treaty provided them with a right to do vis-a-vis Spain, they took it into ICSID arbitration and won awards totalling hundreds of millions of dollars. Blasket Renewable Investments subsequently purchased some of these awards for enforcement, and as such Spain’s total international exposure has now eclipsed two billion dollars globally, including hundreds of millions in the United States.
Instead of doing what it was supposed to do, Spain decided on obstruction. Its two step analog on the legal strategy, claim immunity under US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act; then invoke EU law (pointing to CJEU jurisprudence Achmea and Komstroy ) & argue that “intra-EU” arbitration never created governing law, as a matter of fact. Put bluntly: Spain entered into a treaty, was defeated under the terms of that treaty’s dispute-resolution mechanism (as designed and created by the parties within the same ink), then invented a legal theory ex post facto claiming this arbitration clause binding it was never really valid. You would be hard-pressed to think of a more shameless use of “rule of law” rhetoric than claiming you should not have to follow a rule you committed to because your own regional court subsequently ruled that it was not fond of the rule.
The bigger point is that US courts have cemented their role today as the enforcement backstop when EU politics disappoint investors. Rather than let European courts passively ignore their member states’ ingenious loopholes at the first sign of a conflict-avoiding obligation, Washington’s courthouses are the only credible venue for honest accountability. It should embarrass Brussels a lot more than it vindicates Madrid..
This is significant for its broader implications, as US courts have now established themselves clearly as the enforcement backstop for when EU politics let investors down. As much as European courts have confounded by allowing member states to create legal loopholes whenever incredibly inconvenient obligations arise, so Washington’s courthouses finally become the last honest venue for accountability. That should shame Brussels much more than it vindicates Madrid.
This case was not lost by Spain on a technicality, Spain was trying to have it both ways: reap the benefits of investment inflows from the renewable subsidies and then, having attracted that capital, expunge any legal obligations which made those inflows possible in retrospect. However, returning to the Supreme Court’s silence on 29 June, the loudest of all verdicts still is that sovereign promises need to mean something, even when keeping them comes at a high cost.
Fransiscus Nanga Roka
Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia
