KH Wong & Co

On the court record

KH Wong & Co appears in the reported judgments as a civil and commercial-litigation practice, working mainly in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) with a matter in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and appearing most often as defendant or intervener. A distinctive strand of its corpus is interpleader: a series of related matters in which a party sought leave to intervene and be added as a respondent in interpleader proceedings, where competing claimants assert rights to the same fund or property and the stakeholder asks the court to determine who is entitled. The firm also appears in injunction practice, including a Mareva freezing injunction sought against defendants, initially heard ex parte and later inter partes, and the requirement to preserve assets pending trial, and an injunction founded on an allegation of fraud. Its civil-procedure work includes an application to give evidence by way of remote communication technology under the Chief Justice's Practice Direction. The firm's property and construction work includes a dispute over whether a developer is liable to pay liquidated ascertained damages for the late delivery of vacant possession, and it appears in an employment matter concerning the dismissal and suspension of employees and a reference to the Industrial Court. The counterparties in the corpus include property, plumbing and development companies and financial institutions. Acting most often as defendant or intervener, the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus centres on interpleader and injunction work — the machinery by which competing claims to property are resolved and assets are preserved — supported by developer-liability, employment and civil-procedure matters, with the interpleader proceedings a recurring and distinctive feature of its practice. The cluster of related interpleader matters is particularly striking, since it shows the firm repeatedly seeking to bring a party into proceedings to assert a claim over a contested fund, a procedure by which a stakeholder caught between rival claimants is relieved of the risk of paying the wrong party. Its Mareva-injunction work applies a similarly protective logic, freezing assets so that a judgment, once obtained, is not rendered worthless.