Kesavan

On the court record

The firm's record illustrates how the courts treat the ostensible authority of counsel to bind a client to a recorded settlement, and the procedural requirements a bankruptcy notice must meet to withstand a setting-aside application.

Kesavan appears in the corpus as counsel in insolvency and civil-procedure litigation, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), with a recurring focus on bankruptcy and the enforcement of judgments.

One strand of the firm's work concerns the validity of a recorded settlement. Acting for the plaintiff, the firm appeared in an application to declare a consent judgment valid, where a settlement had been recorded and signed in court but the plaintiff, who was not present, later claimed a lack of consent. The court examined whether the plaintiff's counsel had apparent and ostensible authority to compromise the claim and whether any prejudice or injustice had been shown, a question that goes to the security of settlements reached through solicitors.

The firm also appeared in bankruptcy litigation. In one matter, acting for the respondent, it defended an appeal against a Senior Assistant Registrar's refusal to set aside a bankruptcy notice, where the judgment debtor contended that the notice was defective, did not accord with the terms of the judgment, and had improperly combined two or more judgments. In a related matter it acted for the petitioner where a judgment debtor sought unsuccessfully to set aside a bankruptcy petition.

In corporate-insolvency work the firm acted for the petitioner in an application for a stay of a winding-up order under section 492 of the Companies Act, where the court considered whether the applicant had satisfied the test for the grant of a stay. Taken together, the firm's matters concentrate on the machinery by which creditors enforce debts through bankruptcy and winding-up, and on the corresponding protections available to debtors who say that the process is defective or that a settlement was reached without their authority. The firm's record is a focused insolvency and enforcement practice, attentive to the procedural regularity on which such remedies depend.