A.J Ariffin, Yeo & Harpal

On the court record

A.J Ariffin, Yeo & Harpal appears in the reported judgments as a company and commercial-litigation practice, working mainly in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) with matters in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Company law is the defining strand of its corpus. Its work includes oppression claims under section 346 of the Companies Act 2016, examining the acts and conduct said to amount to oppression of a shareholder, and questions of directors' duties, including the breach of duty by directors and the application of the business-judgment rule under section 214 of the Companies Act 2016, in a matter involving a listed corporation. It also appears in corporate insolvency, including an application for a judicial management order under the Companies Act 2016 — a corporate-rescue mechanism — and a question of undue preference under section 528, where the issue was whether the High Court had wrongly applied that provision. A distinct strand concerns strata management, including the establishment of a management corporation and the relationship between a joint management body and a management corporation. The firm's civil-procedure work includes the amendment of pleadings and whether the amendments were procedurally valid under Order 20 rule 3 of the Rules of Court 2012, the conversion of an originating summons into a writ action, and appeals from the Sessions Court. The counterparties in the corpus include listed and private companies, developers and management bodies. Acting for plaintiffs, appellants, respondents and applicants across these matters, the firm presents as a corporate-disputes practice whose corpus centres on shareholder oppression, directors' duties and judicial management, supported by strata-management and civil-procedure work, with the governance and rescue of companies a recurring theme. The judicial-management matters are a particularly current strand, engaging the court-supervised rescue regime under which a distressed but viable company is placed under an administrator's control to give it an opportunity to restructure, a constructive alternative to immediate winding up.