It promised to keep the staff for a year, then demanded to see their contracts
Staff contracts are not a precondition to choosing stores to take over, Singapore's commercial court held on 23 July 2026, per James Allsop IJ.
The dispute grew out of an arbitration award made in Pittsburgh in August 2024, which a three-member panel handed down in a dispute over 54 former franchise stores in Singapore. Enforcement of that award has already run through the Singapore International Commercial Court and the Court of Appeal, and by May 2026 the whole award stood enforced against the two defendant companies.
One part of the enforced orders reshaped what happens to the people who staff the shops. The defendants had to hand over the lease documents for the 54 former franchise stores, and the franchisor then had to decide which stores to reopen. For each store it chose, the franchisor had to warrant that it would run the store under its own brand for at least 12 months and offer employment for those 12 months to "all store-level and non-executive employees" on substantially similar terms to those in place when the award was made.
That warranty came from the franchisor itself. The tribunal had picked up an offer made in evidence by the franchisor's vice chairman, who said the company was prepared to employ the existing shop staff if it was handed the leases. The court noted the protective purpose behind the arrangement: "As a way of protecting the employees as innocent third parties to this dispute," the tribunal had built the job guarantee into its orders.
The fight before the court was narrower. The franchisor asked the former operator to hand over the full employment contracts of the affected staff, arguing it could not responsibly give the 12-month job warranty without seeing the detail: pay and hours, whether workers were permanent or on fixed terms or commission, insurance, restrictive covenants such as non-compete clauses, share schemes, termination terms, and whether any were foreign employees on work passes. The operator provided some documents but not all, and denied that the orders obliged it to hand over anything.
The court sided with the operator. The enforcement orders, it found, tied the franchisor's decision to the lease documentation, not to the terms of individual shop assistants. "There was no order requiring the employment information concerning individual employees," the court held. The franchisor's own vice chairman had said of running all 54 locations, "this is something that my team has to do an assessment of," which the court read as pointing to rent and commercial factors rather than staff pay.
The franchisor tried to widen the orders through the "liberty to apply" clause, the court's procedural rules and its inherent powers. The court refused, saying its role was to enforce the award, not to rehear an application to vary the relief. It declined to read in a second precondition that an experienced tribunal had not thought necessary and that the franchisor had never asked for.
The application was dismissed with full costs, the court finding "the application was and is plainly without foundation." It did not need to decide the operator's separate argument that the application was an abuse of process.
The judgment records that the court had no power to widen the terms of the award, and that on the orders as made the franchisor's decision on which stores to take was tied to the lease documentation and not to the employees' contracts.
