Babatunde Ajibade

Personal Bio

Job Title: Managing Partner

Areas of Expertise:

Dr Babatunde Ajibade is the managing partner of S. P. A. Ajibade & Co, a corporate and commercial law firm with offices in Lagos, Ibadan and Abuja, Nigeria. Babatunde is a dispute resolution specialist and has expertise in international as well as domestic commercial arbitration. He has acted as counsel in ad-hoc as well as institutional arbitral proceedings under the UNCITRAL and LCIA rules and is currently coordinating an investment treaty arbitration claim against a host state. Babatunde also sits as an arbitrator, and is currently presiding as sole arbitrator in an ad hoc international commercial arbitration with its seat in Lagos, Nigeria involving alleged breaches of the terms of an international executive employment contract; in an ICC arbitration with its seat in London involving alleged breaches of a construction contract for a power utility in Uganda; and in a domestic arbitration involving the termination of a haulage contract. He recently sat as a co-arbitrator in a complicated energy dispute involving alleged breaches of a crude oil handling contract and as sole arbitrator in an ICC arbitration involving breaches of a sale of goods contract, also with their seats in Lagos. Babatunde is a co-chair of the International Bar Association’s African Regional Forum; a director of ICC Nigeria; a vice-president of the ICC Arbitration Commission’s Steering Committee; a director of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce International Arbitration Centre (LACIAC); and a member of the ICC Africa Commission,the African Arbitration Association, the LCIA’s African Users Council, the Lagos Court of Arbitration and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.
Babatunde was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1989. He obtained a LL.M degree in corporate and commercial law in 1990 and a PhD in private international law in 1996, both from King’s College London. He was elevated to the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria in December 2007 and became a Fellow of the Institute in 2015.