Malek, Gan & Partners

On the court record

Malek, Gan & Partners is a Malaysian firm whose reported matters before the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) are concentrated in company law, construction adjudication and shareholder disputes. In the corporate field it has argued the members' right to requisition an extraordinary general meeting under sections 311 and 310(b) of the Companies Act 2016, and the question whether section 310(b) applies only to a single member holding ten per cent of the shares or also to several members whose combined holding reaches ten per cent, a point of practical importance for shareholder activism. It has also appeared in minority-oppression litigation under section 346 of the Companies Act 2016, testing whether majority shareholders may bring an oppression claim and whether the court should intervene prematurely through short-cut mechanisms without adequately pleaded justification.

The firm's construction practice includes adjudication under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012, appearing on both the application to set aside and the application to enforce an adjudication decision, and arguing whether the adjudicator acted in excess of jurisdiction, whether there was a breach of natural justice and whether material evidence had been ignored. It has further litigated an interim injunction to restrain an extraordinary general meeting called to remove a board of directors, where a majority shareholder asserted the right to retain control and the company's financial operations were said to be in deadlock, engaging the adequacy of damages and the balance of convenience.

Taken together, the firm's reported profile is that of a corporate and construction-litigation practice engaged with the mechanics of company governance, the requisition and restraint of general meetings, the reach of the oppression remedy, and the enforcement and challenge of statutory adjudication decisions, the fast-track payment regime on which the construction industry increasingly depends. The recurring theme is the deployment of interlocutory and statutory procedure to control the direction of a company or a construction payment dispute before any final trial.