Kanesalingam & Co

On the court record

Kanesalingam & Co appears in the reported judgments as an insolvency, defamation and constitutional-litigation practice, working across the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan). Insolvency is a recurring strand of its corpus, including a bankruptcy notice and creditor's petition and an appeal against their setting aside, where the issues were whether an incorrect substituted-service date was a fatal defect, whether an amendment was permissible under sections 93(3) and 131 of the insolvency legislation, the validity of substituted service, and the effect of affidavits filed out of time and without leave. A distinct strand concerns defamation, including a matter turning on whether an impugned paragraph referred to the plaintiff and whether the plaintiff was defamed, in litigation involving a listed company and a media publisher, and an appeal after a full trial in which a defamation case was remitted to the Sessions Court for reconsideration. The firm also appears as intervener in a Federal Court constitutional matter engaging Articles 4(1), 4(2) and 10(1)(a) of the Federal Constitution and the constitutionality of a communications offence. Its civil-procedure work includes applications for a stay of execution and further actions. The counterparties in the corpus include listed and media companies, financial creditors and statutory bodies. Acting for respondents, appellants, petitioners, interveners and plaintiffs across these matters, the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus joins insolvency and bankruptcy disputes to defamation and significant constitutional questions, a breadth that ranges from the technical requirements of bankruptcy procedure to the constitutional limits on the regulation of speech. The bankruptcy matters are a particularly technical strand, since a defect in the substituted service of a bankruptcy notice, or an affidavit filed out of time and without leave, can be decisive of whether the notice and the creditor's petition stand or are set aside, and the firm's corpus shows these procedural questions being fought closely on the documents. The defamation matters, by contrast, turn on the ordinary meaning of the words complained of and whether they identify and disparage the plaintiff.