Hakem Arabi & Associates

On the court record

Hakem Arabi & Associates is a Malaysian firm whose reported matters before the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) span property, contract, land and civil-procedure litigation. In the strata and property field it has acted for a large group of unit purchasers in a dispute with a joint management body and developer over the prolonged and unjustified delay in establishing proper strata management and issuing strata titles, engaging the Strata Titles Act and the Strata Management Act. Its contract and land work includes a landlord-and-tenant dispute over whether a registered lessee, as beneficial owner with proprietary rights in the land, had granted an indefinite extension of a tenancy, where the parol evidence rule and section 92 of the Evidence Act 1950 governed the admissibility of any oral or implied variation.

The firm has also litigated an appeal at the Court of Appeal over sale and purchase agreements said to be sham documents disguising an unlicensed moneylending transaction contrary to the Moneylenders Act 1951, testing whether the agreements were intended to conceal a loan and, if so, the effect of that illegality on their enforceability. It has argued an application for an interim injunction in a passing-off dispute, meeting a preliminary objection on procedural compliance and addressing whether there were serious questions to be tried and where the balance of convenience lay, and it has appeared in a civil appeal over the recovery of a deposit paid toward the purchase of land where the issue document of title was in question. In the deposit-recovery appeal the court weighed whether the issue document of title supported the buyer's entitlement to the return of the ten per cent paid toward the purchase of the land. The reported profile is that of a property and commercial-litigation practice engaged with strata governance, tenancy and land, the recurring problem of disguised moneylending, and the interim relief that shapes a dispute before trial.