Chooi & Company

On the court record

Chooi & Company appears in the reported judgments as a high-value commercial, regulatory and public-law litigation practice, working across the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Its corpus is distinguished by its complexity and its significant counterparties. A notable public-law matter concerns a judicial review of the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, engaging the leave threshold and Article 145(3) of the Federal Constitution, brought by a professional body. The firm appears in the enforcement of arbitral awards under the Arbitration Act 2005, including an ex parte enforcement order under section 39 to enforce an award in a dispute involving a Labuan production-system company and a petroleum operator, and in a substantial jurisdictional contest over whether the Malaysian court has jurisdiction over a foreign law firm and individual, and whether Order 11 of the Rules of Court 2012 requires the claimant to establish jurisdiction for each cause of action, in litigation brought by 1Malaysia Development Berhad. Its company and civil-procedure work includes pre-action discovery under Order 24 rule 7A of the Rules of Court 2012 read with the minority provisions in sections 347 and 348 of the Companies Act 2016, and a full-trial dispute over a joint-development agreement. It has also appeared in a matter involving the Securities Commission and in a dispute involving a national oil corporation. The counterparties in the corpus include sovereign-linked, energy and regulatory parties, among them 1Malaysia Development Berhad, Sabah Shell Petroleum, Petroliam Nasional Berhad and the Securities Commission. Acting for respondents, appellants, defendants and plaintiffs across these matters, the firm presents as a litigator built for complex, cross-border and regulatory disputes argued at the higher levels of the court system. The jurisdictional contest is a good illustration of that profile, since the question of whether the Malaysian court may assume jurisdiction over a foreign defendant, and on what basis service out of the jurisdiction may be permitted, decides at the threshold where a multi-jurisdictional dispute will ultimately be fought.