John Lee Kien How @ Mohammad Johan Lee

On the judicial record

A versatile High Court civil judge whose reported corpus spans medical and road-traffic negligence, contract and land disputes, defamation and family law.

Justice John Lee Kien How @ Mohammad Johan Lee sits in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), and the reported decisions in this corpus are civil, with tort, contract and civil procedure prominent and judgments that carefully label their subject areas. Medical negligence features, including a clinical-negligence claim arising from a ritual circumcision performed by qualified medical assistants, where a post-operative complication developed and a submission of no case to answer was considered. Road-traffic negligence and the assessment of damages for personal injury also recur, brought by injured claimants through litigation representatives.

Contract and property disputes are well represented. One land decision concerns the validity of a 1972 sale agreement — a Surat Perjanjian Jual Tanah Kebun Getah — where the purchaser paid a substantial part of the price and entered continuous occupation but the vendor failed to execute a transfer of title. Tenancy disputes arise, including a claim for rental arrears met by an alleged oral promise to waive rent during the Movement Control Order, later overtaken by a written settlement, and a contract-illegality case involving an 'Ali Baba' arrangement where a Bumiputera main contractor lent its CIDB licence to a non-Bumiputera subcontractor in exchange for a fixed commission, circumventing government procurement policy.

Defamation appears through a claim over Facebook publications by a commercial competitor imputing that the corporate plaintiff was a 'scammer' committing jenayah penipuan (criminal fraud) and selling oil unfit for human consumption. Family and procedural matters round out the docket — a divorce founded on adultery and cruelty decided on the balance of probabilities, questions of locus standi where a committee appointed under the Mental Health Act 2001 dissolved on the patient's death, and the consequences of a plaintiff departing from a pleaded case mid-trial by testifying to a loan advanced to an individual rather than the corporate entity pleaded, then withdrawing the claim against the principal debtor. Summary disposal on a point of law under Order 14A of the Rules of Court also features, decided against the high threshold that applies where material facts are in dispute. The corpus reflects a versatile High Court civil judge who labels and works methodically through each subject area a case raises.