Skrine

On the court record

Skrine appears in the reported judgments as a commercial-disputes practice whose corpus work is concentrated in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), acting most often for defendants and plaintiffs in banking, insolvency and company matters. Civil procedure is the single most frequent theme — summary judgment under Order 14 of the Rules of Court 2012, setting aside orders made in a party's absence, committal for contempt, judicial review, and applications to stay proceedings. A notable line of its cases concerns cross-border enforcement: a creditor's bankruptcy petition founded on a Singapore judgment registered under the Reciprocal Enforcement of Judgments Act 1958, in which the court weighed whether it could look behind a registered foreign judgment resting on a gambling-related credit facility, and the public policy under section 26 of the Civil Law Act 1956 and section 31 of the Contracts Act 1950 against enforcing gambling debts, together with the effect of a later Federal Court decision and the doctrine of issue estoppel. The firm also appears in corporate insolvency — winding up on the just-and-equitable ground under sections 465 and 466 of the Companies Act 2016 and applications to stay a winding-up — and in injunction practice, including a mandatory interlocutory injunction to preserve the subject matter of a fuel-retail supply agreement on American Cyanamid principles. It has litigated strata and mixed-development questions over the validity of a bifurcated management structure under the building and strata-management regime, and applications to set aside orders made in the absence of a defendant. Its counterparties in the corpus are heavily institutional, including Malayan Banking Berhad, Bank of China (Malaysia) Berhad, Bank Pembangunan Malaysia Berhad, the Export-Import Bank of Malaysia Berhad and Chevron Malaysia Limited. The pattern is that of a firm acting for banks, financiers and corporations in enforcement, insolvency and procedural disputes, with occasional appearances in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) and the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan).