By Toby McIntosh
Almost one in six cases brought against governments before the world’s largest investor-dispute body are financed by third parties, according to new data shared with Eye on Global Transparency.
This information comes from the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) at the World Bank, the world’s largest dispute resolution body. There are approximately 300 cases pending at ICSID, brought mostly by corporations against governments for alleged violations of investment treaties, national laws and contracts.
Some cases are backed by “third parties,” usually finance companies, hedge funds and specialist litigation finance companies. “Third-party funding” (TPF) provides financial support for those bringing cases in exchange for a cut of any eventual award.
But how many such TPF arrangements exist has been hidden.
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16 Percent of Recent ICSID Cases Are TPF
ICSID, however, provided EYE with aggregate data.
ICSID said 19 cases have been funded by third parties from July 1, 2022, when a new partial disclosure rule went into effect, until April 19, 2025. In the same period, 119 cases were opened, ICSID said.
So 16 percent of these cases were backed by third parties.
The meaning of this new and seemingly small bit of data will likely be debated by critics and supporters of TPF.
Critics say TPF encourages more cases to be brought and gives well-resourced complainants an edge over the respondents, who sometimes are countries without the expertise or resources to handle the lengthy litigation that ensues. There is concern that investors may influence or control decisions on litigation strategy, including whether to settle.
Proponents say TPF helps improves access to justice for claimants who lack sufficient resources.
But there is no empirical evidence on the subject, such as whether most TPF-backed cases are brought by financially constrained individuals or small enterprises.
Ladan Mehranvar, a senior legal researcher who studies ISDS finance at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), told EYE, “Despite claims that TPF promotes access to justice, there is no public data to substantiate this,” said. She elaborated:
What we do know is that funding arrangements are often opaque and may introduce conflicts of interest or distort settlement incentives. In a system already heavily tilted in favor of investors, third-party funding further entrenches this imbalance—granting powerful financiers access to a mechanism that is completely out of reach for the actual communities impacted by investment projects and investment disputes. That unrelated financial actors can leverage ISDS while affected people, whose livelihood is often at stake, have no standing is an egregious reflection of the system’s fundamental inequities.
Two Tanzanian lawyers in a 2025 Daily Jus article looked at a case brought against Tanzania by company, with third-party support, that resulted in an award over $80 million against Tanzania. Ubena John Agatho and Mark Malekela concluded:
While TPF has the potential to enhance access to justice, it also raises serious concerns about procedural fairness and cost allocation. The reluctance of tribunals to engage deeply with these issues reflects a broader gap in the regulation of TPF within the ICSID framework and national arbitration laws.
They also said, “Whether through mandatory disclosure rules, limitations on funder involvement, or more frequent use of security for cost orders, the landscape of ISDS arbitration is likely to evolve in response to the growing prevalence of TPF.”
Weak Transparency Rules
The prevalence of TPF has remained unclear because of incomplete transparency by the handful of bodies who adjudicate the disputes within what’s broadly called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system.
The World Bank’s ICSID does require disclosure of the existence of “third party funding,” a measure adopted in 2022. However the transparency is limited. Notifications get sent to the three-person tribunal panels that decide the cases and to the parties, but are not placed on the public record. (See Nov. 28, 2022, EYE article, Lack of Transparency for Arbitrations at ICSID May Persist Despite New Rules.)
A working committee at the second largest ISDS body, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), is considering a disclosure requirement like that of ICSID. The proposal would not mandate public disclosure of TPF arrangements.
The Guardian Finds 75 TPF Cases
An effort to find cases backed by third parties was published by The Guardian in March, turning up 75 examples.
The Guardian scrapped case files looking for documents that indicated the presence of TPF. They looked at 1,400 closed and active cases from ICSID, UNCITRAL and three other arbitration bodies from 1976 until December 2024.
The Guardian reporters, Patrick Greenfield and Phoebe Weston, said the number found is “is likely to be a substantial underestimate.”
Information about funding arrangements surfaces only sporadically in press releases or case filings challenging conflicts of interest. “Even in cases where a challenge is made, the decision on that challenge may not be published,” said Mehranvar. “There is no systematic transparency requirement for decisions involving third-party funding,” she said.
“Moreover,” Mehranvar commented, “focusing only on the percentage of funded cases risks missing the deeper problem: the real concern lies not just in how many cases are funded, but in the nature of the cases being backed, the incentives created by third-party funding itself, the further exacerbating asymmetry created, particularly when it comes to impacted communities.”
She said, “A close examination of funded disputes reveals how TPF can fuel claims that aggressively challenge public interest regulation, extract exorbitant damages, and exacerbate the already one-sided character of the ISDS system.”
