Nazri Yahya & Co

On the court record

A practice recorded at the intersection of land title, trusts and succession with public-law challenges to local-authority planning decisions, turning on the evidence needed to establish an interest in land.

Nazri Yahya & Co is recorded in the corpus across land, trusts, estate administration and judicial review, all in the High Court. In one matter the firm acted for the respondent in an application for judicial review to quash a decision of the Majlis Perbandaran Hulu Selangor granting planning permission, where purchasers of plots of land sought, in the alternative, to have the impugned decision amended; the threshold question was whether those applicants were persons aggrieved by the decision such that review ought to be allowed. A second matter concerned land compensation: the firm acted for the defence in an originating summons in which the plaintiffs sought compensation moneys, and where the court found that the existence of disputed facts requiring oral evidence made the summons unsuitable for determination on affidavit, ordering that it be converted into a writ under Order 28 rule 8(1) of the Rules of Court 2012. The firm's trust and estate work is represented by a matter in which it acted for the applicant and which turned on an alleged amanah (trust) over registered land evidenced by an unregistered trust deed. The court addressed the requirement to prove intention, subject matter and beneficiary, treated statutory declarations by the heirs and after-the-fact, self-serving evidence with caution, and considered whether it could appoint a new trustee absent a proven trust, before dismissing the application with costs and engaging the National Land Code and the Trustee Act 1949. Across these matters the firm is recorded handling the intersection of land title, trusts and succession, together with public-law challenges to local-authority planning decisions, work that repeatedly comes back to the sufficiency and quality of the evidence needed to establish a claimed interest in land. In the trust matter the court declined to appoint a new trustee where no valid trust had been proved, and dismissed the applicant's originating summons with costs, treating the heirs' statutory declarations as insufficient to establish the claimed amanah.