Funke Adekoyan
Mrs. Funke Adekoya SAN is an independent arbitrator and litigation consultant, having retired from her role as a partner at ǼLEX, a Lagos, Nigeria-based law firm which she co-founded in 2004. After being called to the Nigerian Bar in 1975, she earned her LLM in 1977 from Harvard Law School, Boston, USA. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, a Chartered Arbitrator, and a Fellow of the Institute of Construction Industry Arbitrators in Nigeria.
She has been actively practising law since her call to the bar, accumulating 50 years of experience in commercial litigation and dispute resolution and regularly appearing before all the courts of record in Nigeria. She has also provided expert witness statements and opinions on issues of Nigerian law for use in courts in Turkey, the United States of America, Italy, and the United Kingdom. In this role, she has had to engage with their court systems and procedures.
In 2001, she was elevated to the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria, the Nigerian equivalent of Kings Counsel in the United Kingdom, (becoming the 5th woman to be so elevated) and thereafter qualified as a Solicitor in England and Wales in 2004, where she currently holds a non-practising licence.
In November 2020, she concluded a 6-year term as a member of the World Bank Group Sanctions Board, which is the final decision maker in contested cases arising out of allegations of fraud, corruption, and collusion in World Bank Group-financed development operations. She currently sits on the Sanctions Appeals Board of the African Development Bank.
As an arbitrator, she has participated in high-value commercial and investor-state arbitration proceedings under the LCIA, ICC, and ICSID Arbitration Rules, in addition to ad hoc arbitration proceedings administered by the PCA under the UNCITRAL Rules. In this role, she has been appointed as either a co-arbitrator or a presiding arbitrator in disputes involving both African and non-African parties.
She has been a Vice President of the ICC Court of Arbitration, a Vice President of ICCA [the International Council for Commercial Arbitration] and a member of its Governing Board. Upon concluding her term in April this year, she was elected to its Advisory Board.
She currently sits on the Courts of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre [SIAC] and the Abu Dhabi International Arbitration Centre [ ArbitrateAD].