Alfred Lai & Partners

On the court record

Alfred Lai & Partners is a Malaysian firm whose reported matters run across the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan), with a clear centre of gravity in commercial and equity disputes. Trusts and fiduciary conduct feature prominently. The firm has litigated a claim for fraud and fraudulent breach of trust arising from a declaration of trust, where the court looked beyond the apparent form of the instrument to scrutinise the underlying transactions. A connected strand concerns illegal moneylending: the firm has argued cases on licensed moneylending and moneylending agreements under the Money Lending Act 1951, the consequences of statutory illegality and voidness ab initio, and the availability of restitution under section 66 of the Contracts Act 1950 and the effect of section 24. At Federal Court level the same dispute produced argument on assignment, partial performance and failure, prospective overruling and the boundaries of restitution and repudiation.

The firm's company and securities work includes a breach-of-shareholders'-agreement claim testing whether shares were unconditionally owned or had to be surrendered, whether a director had breached his duties and whether the contra proferentem rule applied. It has also appeared in a substantial claim for damages arising from the sale of shares and control of a public listed company, where an interim injunction was sought and the Securities Commission Malaysia (Suruhanjaya Sekuriti Malaysia) featured as a statutory regulator and amicus curiae under the Securities Commission Act. In the trust dispute the court observed that documents which at first blush appeared to be an ordinary instrument revealed, on closer examination of the underlying transactions, a different character, an approach that illustrates the firm's emphasis on the substance of a transaction over its form. The reported profile is that of a commercial-litigation practice with particular depth in trusts, illegality and restitution, and in shareholder and securities disputes that reach the appellate courts.