Tommy Thomas

On the court record

Tommy Thomas appears in the reported judgments as a litigation practice spanning commercial, constitutional and public-law disputes, working across the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). A recurring commercial cluster concerns the stay of execution of a money judgment and appeals against an order granting a stay, argued around whether "special circumstances" exist, in litigation involving a group of property and construction companies. The firm's public-law work includes a notable question of whether the Attorney General enjoys immunity from civil action in respect of the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, and disputes engaging the Federal Roads Act 1959. It also litigates land and compensation matters under the Land Acquisition Act 1960, including the definition of a "person interested" under sections 3 and 43, and property disputes over land. On the insolvency side it appears in winding-up petitions (petisyen penggulungan) and in the question whether a petition may be struck out or stayed pending the resolution of a related suit, and in post-bankruptcy appeals to a judge in chambers. Its civil-procedure matters include the transfer of proceedings, applications for an ad interim injunction, and challenges founded on an allegation of a real danger of bias in the court below. The counterparties in the corpus are largely corporate. Acting on both sides of the record — for appellants, defendants, plaintiffs, applicants and interveners — the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus work joins substantial commercial disputes to questions of public and constitutional law. Its insolvency matters include the question whether a winding-up petition may be adjourned or stayed pending the resolution of a related civil suit decided after full trial, and whether an earlier plea in that suit binds the later petition. Its civil-procedure record extends to applications under Order 92 rule 4 invoking the court's inherent jurisdiction and to interlocutory injunctions to hold the position between the parties. The breadth of the work — from money-judgment stays to constitutional immunity and land compensation — marks a practice unusually willing to argue the harder questions at the intersection of commercial and public law.