Zul Rafique & Partners

On the court record

Zul Rafique & Partners appears in the reported judgments as an arbitration and construction-disputes practice, working mainly in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) with matters in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Arbitration is the defining strand of its corpus. Its work under the Arbitration Act 2005 includes the recognition and enforcement of an arbitral award and the resolution of a dispute where a respondent was alleged to be in breach of express terms, argued through a set of related originating summonses in which one party sought to enforce an award and the counterparty sought to resist it, in litigation between a Samsung C&T–UEM construction joint venture and a construction contractor. Alongside the arbitration work, the firm appears in tort — a road-traffic-accident claim concerning a rented vehicle and an alleged brake failure, and the question of who bears responsibility — and in civil procedure, including applications by defendants to strike out a plaintiff's writ and statement of claim and a recusal application in the course of proceedings. Its company-law matters include shareholder oppression under section 346 of the Companies Act 2016. The counterparties in the corpus are substantial construction and engineering parties, among them Eversendai Constructions (M) Sdn. Bhd., the Samsung C&T–UEM construction joint venture and Malaysia Marine and Heavy Engineering Sdn. Bhd. Acting for defendants, appellants, respondents and plaintiffs across these matters, the firm presents as a litigator whose corpus centres on arbitration — the enforcement and resistance of awards and the disputes over express contractual terms that underlie them — and on the construction, tort and procedural questions that surround high-value commercial and infrastructure work. The set of related originating summonses over a single award is a good illustration of the firm's arbitration practice, since the enforcement of an award and the resistance to it are often fought in parallel, one party seeking to convert the award into an enforceable judgment and the other seeking to hold it up. Its appearances for major engineering and marine-heavy-engineering parties confirm a practice engaged with the largest construction and infrastructure disputes.