Joshua Aaron Keet

On the court record

Joshua Aaron Keet is a Malaysian firm whose reported matters before the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) are concentrated in housing-development and civil-procedure litigation, with a strand of criminal work. A recurring subject is the liquidated ascertained damages payable for the late delivery of housing. The firm has appeared in a judicial review challenging a decision of the Home Buyers Claim Tribunal (Tribunal Tuntutan Pembeli Rumah) that had awarded liquidated damages calculated from the date the booking fee was paid as part payment of the purchase price, arguing over whether the relevant thirty-six-month period should run from the date of the sale and purchase agreement or from the earlier payment of the booking fee. Related appeals concerned striking-out applications under Order 18 Rule 19 of the Rules of Court 2012, where a Sessions Court had struck out writs and statements of claim founded on alleged breaches of the sale and purchase agreement.

The firm's civil-procedure work thus centres on the boundary between claims that may proceed and those that are plainly unsustainable, and on the correct forum, tribunal or court, for a home buyer's grievance. On the criminal side it has appeared in an appeal before the Court of Appeal in a prosecution brought by the Public Prosecutor concerning an offence under the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission Act 2009, engaging the presumptions in that Act and the treatment of accomplice and agent-provocateur evidence. In the anti-corruption appeal the firm engaged the statutory presumptions and the cautious treatment the law requires of accomplice and agent-provocateur evidence before a conviction may safely rest upon it. The reported profile is that of a practice built around housing-development disputes and the procedural questions, tribunal jurisdiction, the computation of liquidated damages and the striking out of unsustainable claims, that determine how a purchaser's claim against a developer is resolved, complemented by selective criminal-appeal work.