Hasnah binti Dato' Mohammed Hashim

On the judicial record

A Federal Court judge whose reported corpus settles apex-level questions on consumer-housing damages, third-party motor-insurance liability and revenue law.

Justice Hasnah binti Dato' Mohammed Hashim sits in the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan), Malaysia's apex court, and the reported decisions in this corpus resolve commercial, consumer and insurance questions of general importance. Consumer and housing protection features through a decision on liquidated ascertained damages for the late delivery of vacant possession, where developers had been granted an extension of time to complete a housing project and the question was the validity and effect of that extension on purchasers' claims — a matter of wide consequence for house buyers.

Insurance law is a dominant strand. A substantial group of decisions concerns third-party motor insurance and the effect of a failure to register a change of ownership of a vehicle under section 13(1) of the Road Transport Act 1987, and whether that failure operates to limit or exclude an insurer's liability to a third party who has obtained judgment. A further insurance question concerns the failure to obtain the consent of the Minister of Finance under section 67 of the Insurance Act 1996 and the effect of that Act's repeal by the Financial Services Act 2013, raising which statute governs an agreement entered into before repeal.

Revenue law appears through a stamp-duty appeal on whether an asset-purchase agreement was a conveyance on sale within section 21(1) of the Stamp Act 1949 and therefore dutiable. A further commercial question concerns the failure to obtain ministerial consent under an earlier statute and which legislation governs a transaction entered into before that statute's repeal, a recurring problem of temporal application. As a Federal Court judge, her reported decisions are directed at settling the governing principle for the courts below, and the corpus is notable for the consistency with which it works through statutory language — of the insurance, road-transport and stamp legislation — to fix the rule that the subordinate courts must then apply across the many cases the same provisions generate.