Disputes between partners, promoters or shareholders commonly involve deadlock over management decisions, disagreement on exit valuation, allegations of oppression or mismanagement, and breach of shareholder or partnership agreement terms.
Confidentiality is often the deciding factor in favour of arbitration here: public litigation over an internal ownership dispute can damage a company's standing with lenders, customers and employees well before any decision on the merits, while arbitration keeps the dispute — and any commercially sensitive valuation evidence — out of the public record.
Some matters involving statutory remedies under company law (oppression and mismanagement petitions before the NCLT, for instance) are treated as non-arbitrable and must proceed through the tribunal established for that purpose — shareholder agreements should be drafted with this boundary in mind.