Jeevapartnership

On the court record

Jeevapartnership is a Malaysian firm whose reported matters before the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) are concentrated in commercial, company and civil-procedure litigation, with a recurring focus on interim relief and shareholder disputes. In the field of interim remedies the firm has appeared in an application to set aside an ex parte Anton Piller order, where the court considered whether the plaintiff had shown an extremely strong prima facie case and had given full and frank disclosure, the demanding conditions that govern this most intrusive of civil orders. Its restitution work includes a suit by a company to recover monies said to have been wrongfully received, where payments made by the company had been authorised by its then director, raising questions of authority and unjust enrichment.

The firm's company practice includes minority-oppression litigation, testing whether the removal of a member from management with his shares locked in was oppressive, whether a pending suit for misconduct against the minority barred an oppression action, whether the sale of shares to a new investor had terminated a quasi-partnership on the facts, and whether the valuation expert should be subject to cross-examination. On the appellate side it has appeared in appeals from the Sessions Court following full trials, where cross-appeals were also filed and the parties were referred to as they had been below. In the restitution suit the distinctive feature was that the impugned payments had been authorised by the company's own former director, so that the recovery claim turned on the limits of that director's authority and on unjust enrichment. The reported profile is that of a commercial-litigation practice engaged with the sharpest interlocutory tools, the Anton Piller order and the recovery of misapplied company funds, alongside the oppression and quasi-partnership questions that dominate disputes among the shareholders of closely held companies, and the appellate review of trial findings.