Saifuz & Co

On the court record

A land- and commercial-litigation practice extending into equity and fiduciary work, engaging joint-venture disputes, trespass, secret profits and constructive trust, with close attention to default-judgment and adverse-inference procedure.

Saifuz & Co is recorded in the corpus in land and commercial litigation, including substantial equity and fiduciary work. A pair of connected High Court matters, in which the firm acted for the plaintiff, arose from a joint-venture arrangement over land and engaged undang-undang tanah and pencerobohan tanah (land law and trespass to land): the disputes concerned a set of agreements — a joint-venture arrangement together with a business-exit agreement and a consultancy agreement — and raised misrepresentation and fraud, conflict of interest, an application for the disqualification of counsel, extensions of time to file a defence, penghakiman ingkar pembelaan (judgment in default of defence), and the amendment of pleadings and counterclaim. A very different High Court matter, in which the firm acted for the defence, concerned breach of fiduciary duty by a senior employee: the court examined whether payments received from contractors were secret profits or bribes, held that a fiduciary holds a bribe on constructive trust for the principal regardless of the source of funds, and considered accessory liability for dishonest assistance under Royal Brunei Airlines v Tan, the treatment of a hostile witness under section 154 and the adverse inference under section 114(g) of the Evidence Act 1950, and the limits of equitable compensation and disgorgement — the claim for punitive, exemplary and aggravated damages being dismissed where equitable compensation already restored the principal, with the court invoking the clean-hands doctrine. Across these matters the firm is recorded handling land and joint-venture disputes on one hand and demanding equity and fiduciary litigation on the other, work that repeatedly engages both the primary conduct in issue and the procedural and evidential tools — disqualification, default judgment, adverse inference — that shape how such claims are proved. In the land cluster the applications included one to disqualify counsel and one to set aside a judgment entered in default of defence, procedural skirmishes that ran alongside the substantive allegations of fraud and conflict of interest.