On September 26, 2014, the Dutch Supreme Court upheld (Dutch only) an arbitration award of US$106 million with post-award interest in favor of Chevron and its affiliates, Texaco Petroleum Co., against Ecuador.  The award was in relation to an oil extraction and exploitation concession agreement in the Amazon territory from 1964, which Ecuador allegedly breached.  According to the press release, Chevron initiated proceedings against Ecuador under a 1997 Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) between Ecuador and the US, arguing that their “claims should be deemed ‘investments’ within the meaning of the BIT,” while Ecuador argued that they “could not be regarded as investments and that the arbiters were therefore not competent to rule on the dispute.”  The Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the Court of Appeal was free to determine that Chevron’s claims should be regarded as “investments” and that “that although the arbitration may have impinged on Ecuador’s national sovereignty to a certain extent, this was a consequence of the treaty (i.e. the BIT) that it had chosen to conclude with the US and the remarkably wide definition of the concept of investment contained in it, a definition that deviates from the term’s common usage.”