W&L Hardware Trading Sdn Bhd v Ketua Pengarah Insolvensi Malaysia

Case Significance

An application to stay a section 145 National Land Code partition order pending appeal and a related set-aside suit, dismissed for want of the special circumstances required for a stay.

This High Court decision concerns an application to stay an order pending appeal, in the context of a dispute over the co-proprietorship and partition of land. The plaintiff had obtained an order dated 20 November 2025 in an originating summons brought under section 145 of the National Land Code 1965 — the provision allowing a co-proprietor to seek termination of co-proprietorship and partition of the land. The plaintiff sought to stay the operation of that order pending its appeal to the Court of Appeal and pending the determination of a separate suit filed at the Kuala Lumpur High Court that sought to set aside an earlier High Court order made in 2017.

The interaction of the parallel proceedings lay at the heart of the matter. The concern was whether allowing the partition to take effect before the disposal of the other civil suit would prejudice parties who might hold legitimate interests in the land, and whether proceeding would offend against the policies of preventing multiplicity of proceedings, abuse of process and res judicata, set against the competing consideration that to deny the plaintiff its rightful ownership of a portion of the land would work grave injustice. On the stay application itself, the Court applied the settled principles that govern the grant of a stay pending appeal: a stay is not granted as of course, and the applicant must ordinarily demonstrate special circumstances, the court balancing the risk that the appeal would be rendered nugatory against the successful party's prima facie entitlement to the fruits of the order.

Applying those principles, the Court dismissed the application for a stay. The judgment is a useful illustration of the approach to a stay pending appeal where a partition order under section 145 of the National Land Code intersects with separate proceedings said to affect interests in the same land, and of the requirement to establish special circumstances before the operation of an order will be suspended.