GLOBAL BUILT SDN BHD v WONG YEN FENG (T/A LKL CEILING ENTERPRISE)

Case Significance

Illustrates the deliberately narrow scope of section 15 of CIPAA and its temporary-finality philosophy: a losing party cannot use a setting-aside application to re-argue the merits, and the statutory grounds for disturbing an adjudication decision are exhaustive rather than an appeal on the merits.

This High Court decision, sitting in the Construction Court at Kuala Lumpur, concerns an application to set aside an adjudication decision under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA). The plaintiff company had been the losing party in a statutory adjudication before an adjudicator, and it filed this originating summons under section 15(b) of CIPAA to set the adjudication decision aside, while the successful claimant — a contractor trading as a ceiling-works enterprise — filed a parallel originating summons to enforce the same decision under section 28. The two summonses were heard together. Section 15 of CIPAA permits an adjudication decision to be set aside only on narrow grounds, such as that the decision was procured by fraud or bribery, a denial of natural justice, or that the adjudicator acted in excess of or without jurisdiction. The plaintiff's complaints did not, in the court's view, engage those grounds. The court found that the plaintiff was in substance attempting to revisit the merits of the dispute because it was unhappy with the adjudicator's decision, which is not a permissible basis for setting aside under CIPAA's deliberately confined regime. Finding no substance in the plaintiff's grounds, the court dismissed the setting-aside summons with costs. Delivered by Nadzarin Wok Nordin J, the judgment is a useful illustration of the limited scope of section 15 and of the temporary-finality philosophy underpinning CIPAA: adjudication delivers swift interim relief on payment disputes, and a dissatisfied party cannot convert a section 15 application into a rehearing of the underlying claim. The decision reinforces that the courts will resist attempts to dress up disagreement with an adjudicator's reasoning as a jurisdictional or natural-justice complaint, and that the statutory grounds for intervention are exhaustive rather than an open invitation to appeal the adjudicator on the merits. The result also demonstrates the practical consequence for a paying party: a section 15 application that fails leaves the adjudication decision standing and ripe for enforcement, so that raising unmeritorious setting-aside grounds achieves nothing but delay and a costs order against the party that raised them.