Leong Wai Hong

On the judicial record

A High Court judge with a firm command of commercial, insolvency, arbitration and cross-border litigation, from schemes of arrangement to jurisdiction over foreign parties.

Justice Leong Wai Hong sits in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), and the reported decisions in this corpus are sophisticated commercial matters, with arbitration, insolvency, intellectual property and cross-border litigation prominent. The interaction between arbitration and insolvency recurs: a decision on staying proceedings pending arbitration notwithstanding the insolvency of a party and the presence of co-defendants who are not parties to the arbitration, examining whether an arbitration agreement remains valid when a party becomes insolvent.

Insolvency and corporate-rescue questions feature, including whether a court may set aside an earlier order that approved a scheme of arrangement under section 366 of the Companies Act 2016, engaging competing views on the court's jurisdiction after a sanction order; a Fortuna injunction to restrain a winding-up petition based on a summary judgment, and the principle that a pending appeal does not preclude a judgment creditor from presenting a petition; and the locus standi to apply for a judicial management order under section 405, where shareholders lacked standing.

Cross-border and enforcement litigation is a distinct strand. A significant decision concerns whether the Malaysian court has jurisdiction over a foreign law firm under section 23(1) of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964 and Order 11 of the Rules of Court in a claim brought by a State-owned company. Pre-action discovery against a bank under Order 24 rule 7A, a quia timet injunction touching an enforcement order under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012, and trademark expungement also feature, as does the striking out of a suit on the maxims ex turpi causa non oritur actio and in pari delicto where parties are equally at fault in an illegal transaction, and applications to give evidence by remote communication technology under the Chief Justice's practice direction and section 15A of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964. The corpus reflects a High Court judge with a firm command of commercial, insolvency, arbitration and cross-border law, resolving each dispute on close construction of the governing statute and the instruments before the court.