Mohanadass Partnership

On the court record

Mohanadass Partnership appears in the reported judgments as an arbitration and commercial-disputes practice, working across the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and appearing most often as respondent or plaintiff. Arbitration is the defining strand of its corpus. Its work under the Arbitration Act 2005 includes the recognition and enforcement of an arbitral award — for example in a matter between a petroleum operating company and a marine-and-heavy-engineering contractor — and disputes over whether a respondent was in breach of express terms and whether there was a breach of the arbitration agreement itself. Alongside the arbitration work, the firm appears in civil procedure, including committal proceedings for contempt of court brought against the directors of a company, and in tort, including a claim combining an allegation of breach of contract against one defendant with negligence against another in a strata context. Its company and insolvency work includes an application to remove a liquidator following a winding-up order. A more unusual matter concerns public utilities, involving the tampering of an electricity meter and a foreign object. The counterparties in the corpus are substantial corporate and statutory parties, among them Malaysia Marine and Heavy Engineering Sdn. Bhd., Damansara Realty (Johor) Sdn Bhd and a federal-territory development authority. Acting most often as respondent or plaintiff, the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus centres on arbitration — the enforcement of awards and disputes over the arbitration agreement and its terms — supported by committal, tort, company and public-utility work, and with a meaningful share of its matters decided at the Court of Appeal. The enforcement matters are a good illustration of the firm's arbitration practice, since the party that has obtained an award must convert it into an enforceable order while the losing party resists, and the court's task is confined to the narrow grounds on which recognition may be refused. Its committal work against company directors, by contrast, shows the firm at the enforcement end of litigation, holding individuals personally to account for a company's breach of a court order.