Haris Ibrahim Kandiah Partnership

On the court record

Haris Ibrahim Kandiah Partnership appears in the reported judgments as a construction, banking and company-litigation practice, working mainly in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) with a matter in the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan) and appearing most often for defendants. Civil procedure recurs, including the striking out of a claim for an outstanding sum arising from inter-company services and third-party notice proceedings. A distinctive strand of its corpus concerns the interaction between arbitration and winding up: a Federal Court matter engaging the Fortuna injunction and the threshold test for the grant of a stay, a dismissal or a Fortuna injunction where an arbitration agreement is in play, and questions of statutory interpretation under section 17A of the Interpretation Acts 1948 and 1976, including the principle that each Act is construed within its own context and that provisions cannot be imported from one statute into another. Its banking and finance work includes facilities agreements and the legal effect of the cancellation of banking facilities, in a matter involving Hong Leong Bank Berhad, and its company-law work engages section 351 of the Companies Act 2016 (replacing section 368A of the Companies Act 1965). The firm also appears in construction disputes over the scope of a main contract and in a strata matter where part of a developed area was compulsorily acquired before strata titles issued, raising questions over the compensation monies. The counterparties in the corpus include construction, banking and infrastructure parties, among them OCBC Bank (Malaysia) Berhad and a statutory transport company. Acting predominantly for defendants, the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus centres on the intersection of construction, banking and company law, with the arbitration-versus-winding-up question and statutory interpretation as recurring and significant themes. The arbitration-versus-winding-up matter is a particularly important one, since it concerns whether a creditor may present a winding-up petition on a debt that the parties have agreed to arbitrate, a question on which the threshold for restraining or dismissing the petition, and the availability of a Fortuna injunction, are closely contested.