Shui Tai

On the court record

Shui Tai appears in the reported judgments as a company and commercial-litigation practice with a strong appellate element, dividing its work between the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and appearing most often as respondent. Minority oppression is a defining strand of its corpus: claims by minority shareholders that their removal from management, with their shares locked in, was conducted in an oppressive manner, and the remedies that follow. The firm also litigates schemes of arrangement under sections 366 and 368 of the Companies Act 2016, a court-supervised mechanism for compromising a company's obligations with its members or creditors, and it appears in the removal of a joint liquidator on the application of a contributory. Its civil-procedure work includes the transfer of proceedings under Order 57 of the Rules of Court 2012 and consolidated appeals, and it litigates contractual disputes such as a claim founded on the breach of a collaboration and sale-of-business agreement. A further strand concerns judicial review of part of an award of the Industrial Court, where an applicant contended he had been dismissed without just cause. The counterparties in the corpus include engineering, energy and financing companies such as Hitachi Zosen Corporation, Cypark Sdn Bhd and Affin Bank Berhad. Acting most often as respondent, and with a substantial share of its work at the appellate level, the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus centres on shareholder-oppression and scheme-of-arrangement disputes, supported by industrial-relations judicial review and the civil-procedure and contractual questions that surround company litigation. The oppression matters in particular require the court to decide whether the conduct of those in control of a company was unfairly prejudicial to a minority, and whether locking a departing shareholder into an illiquid holding while removing him from management crosses that line. The scheme-of-arrangement work, by contrast, engages the firm in the court-supervised restructuring of a company's obligations, a constructive rather than adversarial use of the companies legislation.