Amazon Urges Court to Deny Motion to Remand Arbitration Petition

The U.S. District Court for Southern New York should deny Jiakeshu Technology’s “misguided” motion to remand its petition to vacate an arbitration award to the same New York Superior Court from which Amazon removed it Nov. 29, said Amazon’s opposition Friday (docket 1:22-cv-10119).

Jiakeshu's petition seeks to recover $50,000 in sales proceeds that an arbitrator ruled Amazon can keep after Amazon shut down the third-party seller for improperly paying customers to manipulate online product reviews (see 2212230010). Jiakeshu’s request to vacate the arbitration award is governed by the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards because Jiakeshu is a foreign corporation, said Amazon.

Jiakeshu’s motion to remand is “a confused grab bag of irrelevant arguments and inapposite authority,” said Amazon. It provides “no basis to avoid” the district court’s “clear jurisdiction,” it said. Jiakeshu argued that the arbitration award is “wholly domestic” and the Convention does not apply because Washington law governs the contract between the parties and the American Arbitration Association procedural rules applied to the arbitration, it said.

That is “incorrect,” said Amazon. The Convention and Section 230 of the Federal Arbitration Act say an arbitration award “falls under the Convention where, as here, at least one party is not a United States citizen,” it said. “This is true in all instances and irrespective of the law that governs the parties’ contractual relationship or the arbitration’s procedure.”

Jiakeshu also “mischaracterizes” 2nd Circuit authority and cites out-of-district cases to argue that Section 203 “confers subject matter jurisdiction only over petitions to confirm arbitration awards and not petitions to vacate,” said Amazon. “This is also wrong,” it said. Binding 2nd Circuit authority “unambiguously establishes” that Section 203 “confers subject matter jurisdiction over petitions to vacate arbitration awards that fall under the Convention,” it said.

Jiakeshu otherwise launches a “scattershot” of arguments about jurisdictional doctrines that Amazon doesn't invoke “and which have no bearing whatsoever on the straightforward grounds for federal question jurisdiction here,” said Amazon. The proceeding concerns a petition to vacate “a nondomestic arbitration award that falls under the Convention,” it said. The district court “therefore has federal question jurisdiction,” it said.