Ho, Loke & Koh

On the court record

The firm's record illustrates the limits of a management corporation's power to impose differential maintenance charges under section 60(3)(b) of the Strata Management Act 2013, and the treatment of such charges as a collateral attack on the allocation of share units.

Ho, Loke & Koh appears in the corpus as counsel in strata-management litigation, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan), with a marked concentration on the rating of parcels in mixed commercial developments.

The firm's principal reported work is a connected dispute over the maintenance charges imposed on car-park parcels in a mixed commercial development. Acting for a party at first instance and on appeal, the firm was engaged where a management corporation had, by resolution at its first annual general meeting, imposed multiple rates of charges, with the car-park parcels bearing the highest rate of maintenance charges and sinking-fund contribution, on the stated aim of correcting an unequal allocation of share units. The challenge was that the resolution was ultra vires the Strata Management Act 2013, since only a single rate may be imposed unless it can be shown that the parcels are used for significantly different purposes under section 60(3)(b), all the parcels being commercial with no exclusivity in the common facilities, and that the multiple rates were a collateral attack on the share-unit allocation that ought instead to have been challenged by judicial review. The Court of Appeal upheld the challenge, finding the computation arbitrary.

The firm also appeared in a strike-out matter, acting for the defendant, where an action arising from the dismissal of earlier objections and judicial-review proceedings was said to be caught by res judicata, the present action mirroring matters previously adjudicated, and to be time-barred under the Limitation Act 1953 as no fresh breach had been pleaded, engaging the objection that multiple limbs of Order 18 rule 19 had been pleaded cumulatively. The firm's record is a specialised strata-litigation practice, concentrated on the governance and financing of subdivided commercial developments, where the fairness of the charges levied on individual parcels and the proper forum for challenging a management corporation's resolutions are the questions that most often recur, and where the interaction between the strata legislation and the general principles of res judicata and limitation frequently shapes whether a dissatisfied proprietor's claim can proceed at all.