Wan Ahmad Ridzuan & Co.

On the court record

A practice engaging the supervisory jurisdiction over public and disciplinary decisions and the corporate-rescue mechanism of judicial management under the Companies Act 2016.

Wan Ahmad Ridzuan & Co. is recorded in the corpus in administrative-law and corporate-rescue litigation before the High Court. In one matter the firm acted for the plaintiff, a medical officer who had served with a municipal council and later resigned, in a claim founded on the council's alleged negligence in handling and disposing of his Buku Perkhidmatan (service book) — the record his new employer required in order to update the continuity of his service — the council having informed both the plaintiff and his new employer that his personal file and service book had been disposed of. In a second matter the firm acted for the applicant in an application for judicial review directed at the disciplinary and appeal committees of a statutory body, where the grounds were whether the impugned decision was tainted by irrationality and by procedural impropriety — the classic supervisory grounds on which an administrative decision may be quashed. In a third matter the firm acted for the respondent in an application for a judicial-management order under sections 404 and 405 of the Companies Act 2016, where the court had to consider whether the statutory requirements were satisfied, whether the company was unable to pay its debts, and whether judicial management was more likely than not to achieve its statutory purposes — including whether the proposed rehabilitation plan was viable rather than speculative and whether it offered a more advantageous realisation of assets than winding up. Across these matters the firm is recorded engaged with the supervisory jurisdiction over public and disciplinary decision-making and with the corporate-rescue mechanism of judicial management, work in which the governing statutory tests and the sufficiency of the evidence to satisfy them tend to decide the outcome. In the judicial-management matter the court scrutinised whether the proposed business projects were speculative and whether there was proof of funding, the absence of which bore on whether rehabilitation offered a more advantageous realisation of assets than winding up.