Kamarudin & Partners

On the court record

The firm's record shows how illegality under the Capital Markets and Services Act 2007 can bar a commission claim, and how the courts apply forum conveniens to a defamation action arising from borderless internet publication.

Kamarudin & Partners appears in the corpus as counsel in civil litigation spanning defamation, financial-services and estate disputes, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) in both English and Bahasa Malaysia.

One matter concerned the transfer of a defamation action. Acting for the defendant, the firm appeared where a plaintiff's internet-publication defamation suit was the subject of an application under Order 57 rule 1 of the Rules of Court 2012 to transfer the action between judicial centres, the court examining the doctrine of forum conveniens, the plaintiff's choice of forum, the convenience of parties and witnesses, and whether the borderless nature of online publication meant that internet accessibility alone determined the proper forum, ultimately allowing the transfer.

In financial-services litigation the firm acted for the appellant in a claim for introducer fees and commission against fund-management companies, where the court considered illegality as a threshold bar arising from unlicensed dealing in securities under sections 58 and 59 of the Capital Markets and Services Act 2007, the absence of registration as a marketing representative, and the effective-cause doctrine, quantum meruit and unjust enrichment.

The firm also appeared in estate litigation, acting for plaintiffs in a strike-out application under Order 18 rule 19 concerning a challenge to a letter of administration said to be time-barred under section 29(1) of the Small Estates (Distribution) Act 1955, together with questions of locus standi, unparticularised allegations of fraud and an alleged suppressed will, and separately in an application to amend an originating summons to obtain documents relating to property transactions. The firm's record is a general civil-litigation practice engaging reputational, financial-regulatory and succession questions across both languages. What connects these otherwise distinct matters is a recurring engagement with threshold and jurisdictional questions, where a case can be transferred, barred by illegality, or struck out as time-barred before its merits are ever reached, so that much of the firm's advocacy is directed at whether and where a claim may proceed at all rather than at how it should ultimately be decided.