Azlan bin Sulaiman

On the judicial record

A High Court judge whose reported corpus is concentrated in construction payment and security disputes, applying CIPAA 2012 adjudication and Arbitration Act 2005 award-review principles.

Justice Azlan bin Sulaiman sits in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), and the reported decisions in this corpus are strikingly specialised in construction disputes and the statutory adjudication and arbitration machinery that governs them. Adjudication under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA) is a dominant theme. Numerous decisions concern applications under sections 15, 16 and 28 of CIPAA to set aside, stay and enforce an adjudication decision, where the recurring questions are whether the adjudicator exceeded his jurisdiction under section 15(d) by deciding a matter outside the dispute referred, whether there was a breach of natural justice, and whether enforcement should follow.

Arbitration disputes sit alongside the adjudication work. Decisions address applications to set aside and enforce arbitral awards under sections 37 and 38 of the Arbitration Act 2005 on grounds of excess of jurisdiction, breach of natural justice or conflict with public policy, and a question of whether an arbitral interim order directing a retention sum into a stakeholder escrow account was an 'award' capable of being set aside.

The substantive construction claims behind these applications concern advance-payment guarantees and performance bonds, and whether a call on such security was valid where the beneficiary's own delays were said to have prevented timely performance; competing claims for unpaid invoices and profit-sharing across multiple projects; and the restructuring of sums paid under bank guarantees into a term loan following a certificate of practical completion. The bond-and-guarantee disputes raise the familiar tension between the autonomy of on-demand security and allegations of unconscionable calling. Recurring across the docket is the theme of finality: how far a court should go behind an adjudicator's or arbitrator's decision, and the deliberately narrow grounds on which such decisions may be reopened, balanced against the industry's need for swift cash-flow relief that the CIPAA regime is designed to provide. The corpus presents a High Court judge whose reported work is heavily concentrated in the construction sector, applying CIPAA and the Arbitration Act 2005 to the payment and security disputes that the industry generates.