The airport was opened on 6 July 1998, as it happens prematurely and there followed a short period when various parts of the airport failed to function as had been intended—leading to, it must be said, a largely media-led public outcry. Whilst many of the airport’s early failings were of a sort one might expect at the commencement of a new major airport, there was an economically damaging failure of the cargo-handling facility owned and built by the private sector. There followed the setting up of various inquiries, the most prominent of which was the Select Committee Inquiry set up by the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.2 The results of this, and other inquiries into the opening of the airport are not the subject of this article but are mentioned because one would have thought that the scenario set out in the various inquiry reports would have provided a fertile breeding ground for numerous contractual disputes. The purpose of this article is to review how the dispute resolution procedures, described in the previous three articles,3 for the three employers involved have worked in practice.

Before doing that, however, it has been over eight years since the first article in this series was published and it may be useful very briefly to refer to some general developments in Hong Kong since then. On 26 June 1997 the Arbitration Ordinance was amended after a committee set up by the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (“HKIAC”) to advise on the reform of arbitration law reported to the Attorney-General. The amendments included a number of important changes to Hong Kong arbitration law,4 including the vesting of default powers to appoint arbitrators in HKIAC for domestic and international arbitrations. This power had previously vested in the High Court.