If you followed Rockhopper’s dispute with Italy as I have, you may have wondered how the claimant managed to extract value from the arbitration. The company obtained an ICSID award of around EUR 190 million plus interest against Italy in 2022, only to see it annulled 3 years later, in June 2025. Rockhopper had come by the underlying investment by acquiring Mediterranean Oil & Gas, the company that discovered the Ombrina Mare field, for GBP 29.3 million in cash and shares in August 2014, roughly a year and a half before Italy reinstated its coastal drilling ban and refused the field’s production concession. Yet shareholders had little to fret over the annulment. By the time it arrived, the company had already banked a substantial sum, having agreed to sell the economic value of the award in December 2023 and received the first payment in mid 2024.

The arrangement was a funded participation agreement with a specialist fund managing more than USD 4 billion, whose identity has never been disclosed. The fund agreed to pay Rockhopper in up to three tranches in return for a share of whatever the award eventually produced, while Rockhopper kept legal ownership of the award itself. The first tranche was an upfront payment of EUR 45 million, of which Rockhopper retained EUR 19 million after paying out the funder that had financed the original arbitration and meeting the success fees owed to its lawyers. A further EUR 65 million would have followed had the award survived. The upfront payment was not repayable, and the agreement guaranteed the company a minimum of EUR 45 million whatever became of the award, so when Italy’s annulment succeeded the loss fell on the fund rather than on Rockhopper. The company then recovered a further EUR 31 million under a separate annulment insurance policy.

The Rockhopper saga captures a practice that has quietly become a fixture of investor–state arbitration. An award against a state is treated as a financial asset, its risks are passed to a professional buyer, and value flows to the investor and sometimes to the buyer too, even where the award is later annulled or set aside. The practice is known as post-award monetization. How common it has become is hard to say, precisely because the deals are struck in private, but the signs point to a growing market that operates without oversight, alongside the other faces of ISDS’s financialization. What follows is an attempt to pin the practice down and to ask what its growth means for the states, and ultimately the taxpayers, on the paying end.

Reframing an Award as a Financial Asset

Post-award monetization can be defined as the transaction by which a successful claimant transfers some or all of the economic value of a rendered award to a third-party financier, in exchange for an upfront and usually discounted payment. Mascarenhas and Aitelaj describe the arrangement as advancing part of the expected value of an existing or forthcoming award to the claimant, in return for a share of what is eventually recovered. Practitioners put it more plainly, as monetizing an award in exchange for upfront liquidity. The transaction can cover part of an award or all of it. Sometimes it operates as a recovery advance that leaves the original creditor in place, as it did in Rockhopper, and sometimes it is an outright purchase in which the buyer takes on both ownership of the award and the task of collecting it.

What changes is the way the award is treated. Rather than marking the close of a dispute, it becomes a financial asset, a right to a future payment that can be valued, discounted, and sold (Davitti & Vargiu, 2023). Funders and law firms now speak of investment arbitration awards as a distinct asset class (Strain et al., 2024), part of what Schultz describes as a wider commodification of justice through arbitration. The transaction usually takes the form of an award assignment agreement or participation agreement, assembled from tools that funders have borrowed from debt finance, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity (Dupeyron & Laviani Mancinelli, 2022).

Three Distinctions That Matter

Post-award monetization is easily confused with three adjacent practices. Rockhopper is useful again here, because the case involved more than one of those practices at the same time.

The first is third-party funding. A third-party funder pays the costs of a claim before any award exists and takes a share of the proceeds, on a non-recourse basis, if the claim succeeds (Guven & Johnson, 2019). The asset is a bet on a case that has not yet been decided. Monetization comes later, once liability has been established and the amount fixed, when the risk that remains lies in annulment, recognition, and collection rather than in the merits (Mascarenhas & Aitelaj, 2025). Rockhopper is evidence of both. One funder financed the arbitration up to the award and was paid out of the upfront tranche, and a second fund then bought into the award once it existed. The same firms often offer both “services,” but the timing, the risk, and the policy questions are not the same.

The second is the contingency fee. A lawyer acting on contingency shares in the outcome but remains bound by professional duties to act in the client’s interest (Guven & Johnson, 2019). A buyer of an award owes the seller no comparable duty. It is an arm’s-length investor pursuing its own return.

The third is enforcement. Enforcement is the legal process of compelling a reluctant state, or an award debtor, more generally, to pay, through recognition of the award and, where necessary, the seizure of state assets. Monetization is the sale of the right to the proceeds of that process. The two often run together, since the buyer may take over enforcement or rely on the original creditor to pursue it, but they remain distinct. An award can change hands in economic terms while the legal right to enforce it stays formally with the original investor, a separation that English law has now entrenched, as discussed below (Bada, 2026).

Why a Secondary Market Has Emerged

Collecting an award from a state is slow, costly, and uncertain, and that is what makes monetization attractive. Sovereign immunity from execution places most state assets, among them central bank reserves and diplomatic and military property, beyond the reach of seizure, and the rare attempts to pierce that protection seldom succeed. Recovery can take a decade or more, often forcing an investor to trace assets across several jurisdictions and to relitigate the same questions in each (Gaillard & Penushliski, 2020; St John et al., 2024). An investor that has already spent years obtaining an award may have little appetite for years more of enforcement with no guarantee of payment. Selling the award at a discount converts an illiquid and contested entitlement into cash and hands the risk to a buyer that specializes in carrying it (Mascarenhas & Aitelaj, 2025). Rockhopper described its own deal in just these terms, saying that monetization removed future costs, reduced the risk attached to the award, and freed it to put capital back into its core business, all without waiting out an annulment and an enforcement battle against Italy.

The market now reaches well beyond isolated deals. Awards against Argentina, for instance, have been bought by dedicated vehicles, with the El Paso award acquired by Gasa Investments and the BG Group award by Queen Avenue Investments (Strain et al., 2024). This trade forms part of a broader financialization of investment arbitration, in which litigation finance has moved from a niche service into an asset class marketed to pension funds and other institutional investors (Davitti & Vargiu, 2023).

A Blind Spot With Public Stakes

For all its growth, post-award monetization has fallen between the academic literature and the regulatory framework alike. The scholarship has developed on either side of it. One body of work studies third-party funding, the financing of claims before an award, and the concerns it raises (Davitti & Vargiu, 2023; Guven & Johnson, 2019). A second and more recent body studies the post-award phase, examining compliance, settlement, and the bargaining that continues after an award is handed down (Chernykh & Sattorova, 2025; St John et al., 2024; Strain et al., 2024). Post-award monetization belongs to neither. It happens after the award, but it is a financing and trading practice rather than a compliance event. A recent brief by Mehranvar (2026) is an exception, treating the monetization of awards as functionally part of the same phenomenon as third-party funding, since outside capital acquires an interest in the proceeds of a claim against a state whether it enters before or after the award. Where doctrinal writing and the courts do engage with it, the question tends to be narrow and technical, namely whether a buyer can step into the original claimant’s shoes and enforce in its own name. The English Commercial Court answered no in OperaFund v Spain (2025), holding that ICSID and ECT awards cannot be assigned and that only a party to the arbitration may seek their recognition and enforcement. The buyer in that case, Blasket Renewable Investments, had won the very same point earlier in 2025 before the Federal Court of Australia in Blasket v Spain, and courts in the United States have allowed assignees of ICSID awards to enforce since the 2013 case of Blue Ridge v Argentina. Both 2025 decisions are under appeal (Bada, 2026). The issue surfaced again in Devas v India (2026), where assignees of two awards against India had been joined to English enforcement proceedings on terms that left the validity of the assignments to be argued another day, before the Court of Appeal shut down enforcement on sovereign immunity grounds in June 2026. These are real questions for the people structuring the deals. They are not the same as asking what the trade in awards means for the public interest in ISDS. That interest is engaged in at least four ways.

The first concerns settlement. A financier’s incentives are not the investor’s. An original investor may be willing to settle on non-monetary terms, for example the restart of a project, a revised licence, or a regulatory adjustment that allows an investment to continue. A buyer that has paid cash for an award wants cash in return and has little reason to accept anything else (Strain et al., 2024). Because monetization takes effect after the award, when a state’s room to manoeuvre is already narrow, it can turn a dispute into a flat demand for money and close off settlements that might have served the public interest better. This concern is distinct from third-party funding, which operates earlier.

The second concerns who receives public money. Paying an award means spending public funds, and monetization can route those funds to actors whose identity is never disclosed. Disclosure obligations for third-party funding have been introduced gradually, including in the 2022 ICSID Arbitration Rules, on the view that the identity and role of a funder can bear on the integrity of a case. Those obligations are built around funders of pending claims, however, and do not clearly catch a financier that buys an award after the case has closed. The upshot is that who actually owns an award against a state, and who stands to profit from it, can be invisible to the public and at times to the respondent state itself (Mehranvar, 2026). Rockhopper’s own buyer has never been named. A government may have sound reasons to know who is ultimately being paid, whether to avoid paying a sanctioned party, a strategic rival, or a politically exposed person, yet the counterparty and anti-money-laundering checks that would normally accompany a large transaction involving public money have no equivalent when the buyer of an award need not identify itself. All of this sits on top of a transparency problem that already marks the post-award phase, where settlements and related dealings frequently go undisclosed and, as Chernykh and Sattorova (2025) observe, clear data on the afterlife of awards is simply missing.

The third concerns the intensity of enforcement. A buyer that has paid for an award has every reason to pursue it hard. Professional buyers bring deep enforcement experience and a readiness to chase a state across many jurisdictions over many years (Gaillard & Penushliski, 2020; Mascarenhas & Aitelaj, 2025). The effect can be sustained pressure on state assets and on the policy space a state retains, applied by a creditor with no connection to the original investment. Sovereign debt offers the cautionary tale. Holdout funds such as NML Capital bought defaulted Argentine bonds at a deep discount and pursued the state through courts on several continents for well over a decade, at one point securing the detention of an Argentine naval training vessel in a Ghanaian port. Buyers of arbitral awards hold an instrument that travels considerably better than a bond, and there is little reason to expect them to show more restraint.

The fourth concerns fragmentation. Because an assignment may be effective in one jurisdiction and ineffective in another, the same award can be monetized on different terms depending on where enforcement is brought (Bada, 2026). OperaFund and Blasket make the point vivid, since the very same buyer prevailed on the assignment question in Australia and lost it in London within the same year. Buyers price that flexibility and choose their forum accordingly, while the state faces a single award now held by a mobile and well-coordinated creditor.

Underneath all of this lies the question of who finally bears the cost. In investor–state arbitration, that is the taxpayers of the respondent state, who pay both to defend claims and to satisfy awards (Davitti & Vargiu, 2023; Guven & Johnson, 2019). Monetization inserts a financial intermediary that takes a profit between the public purse and the original investor, without adding anything to the merits of the underlying dispute. The public pays the same, or more, once enforcement is pushed as far as it will go (e.g., on the amount or correct applicable rate of post-award interest), while a new party captures part of the value. Rockhopper shows the starkest version. Italy succeeded in annulling the award and so, on the merits as they stand, owes nothing, yet the investor had already drawn tens of millions of euros from the claim along the way. Rockhopper has since set a resubmission of the dispute in motion before a new ICSID tribunal, so a state that spent almost 3 years winning annulment now faces the same claim a second time, brought by a claimant that has already been paid once.

Nor will the doctrinal limits now emerging fix any of this. As Bada (2026) notes, when courts block open assignment, the trade does not stop—it moves into private-law structures. The original creditor stays on the court record as the named party, while the money and the control pass to the buyer through assignments of proceeds, security over recoveries, powers of attorney, and, in some deals, the purchase of the company that holds the award. Each of these techniques makes the real party in interest harder to identify, not easier. If the market is to be brought into view, the response will have to come from policy rather than from the courts.

Considerations for Policy-Makers

A fast-growing market in claims against states is operating outside the transparency and accountability agenda that treaty reformers have been pursuing for more than two decades. For those working on investment treaty reform, including the delegations in UNCITRAL Working Group III, several points follow:

• Close the disclosure gap: The disclosure rules developed for third-party funding should be extended to post-award monetization, so that the existence of an assignment or monetization, and the identity of the buyer as the real party in interest, are disclosed to the enforcing court and, where possible, placed on the public record.
• Bring the afterlife of awards within the transparency agenda: The UNCITRAL Transparency Rules rest on a simple premise: disputes that involve public money should be publicly visible. Whatever the limits of the transparency instruments adopted so far, that premise applies with equal force after the award, and it calls for some means of recording who holds an award against a state (Chernykh & Sattorova, 2025).
• Use treaty drafting: Model-treaty language could require a state’s consent to any change of counterparty, restrict assignment to defined categories of buyer, or protect a state’s ability to settle on non-monetary terms even after an award has been monetized.
• Build the evidence base: Governments cannot regulate what they cannot see. Supporting systematic data collection on award trading, building on the empirical work already underway on post-award compliance (Strain et al., 2024), is a precondition for sound policy.
• Keep the wider imbalance in view: Any reform should be judged against whether it serves the stated purpose of investment treaties, the promotion of sustainable and mutually beneficial investment, or whether it simply deepens a one-way market in claims against states.

Rockhopper is unlikely to be the last case of its kind. As awards against states continue to be bought, sold, and repackaged, policy-makers have good reason to bring this market into view, on terms that weigh the public interest alongside the efficiency of the trade.

Author

Lukas Schaugg, Policy Advisor at IISD