Goik, Ramesh & Loo

On the court record

Goik, Ramesh & Loo appears in the reported judgments as a civil and commercial-litigation practice, working mainly in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) with matters in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and appearing most often for plaintiffs. Civil procedure is a recurring theme, including an application to declare a consent judgment valid where a settlement had been recorded, an application to re-amend an amended statement of claim to clarify the case, and an application to set aside a court order made on a previous originating summons. The firm's company and insolvency work includes a question of undue preference under section 528 of the Companies Act 2016, where the issue was whether the High Court had wrongly applied that provision, in a matter involving construction and engineering companies. It also litigates trusts — a finding of breach of trust upheld by the Court of Appeal, requiring the defendant to pay the plaintiff the value of her share — and appears in a judicial-review matter in which a statutory transport corporation sought to intervene in proceedings relating to land. Its contract work includes the interpretation of a finder's-fee arrangement and the conditions for payment on the termination of a project, and a joint-venture agreement where the conduct of the parties and a planning permission under the Town and Country Planning Act 1976 were in issue. Defamation and the classification of the impugned statement also feature. The counterparties in the corpus include construction, engineering and property companies and a statutory transport body. Acting predominantly for plaintiffs, the firm presents as a general commercial litigator whose corpus joins civil-procedure and consent-order questions to company, trust, joint-venture and defamation disputes across a broad commercial field. The undue-preference matter is a good illustration of its insolvency work, since it required the court to consider whether a transaction had improperly favoured one creditor over others in the run-up to insolvency, a question that turns on both the timing of the dealing and the intention behind it. The breach-of-trust and finder's-fee matters, by contrast, show the firm holding parties to the fiduciary and contractual bargains they made, recovering for a claimant the value of what was wrongly withheld.