Raja Segaran a/l S.krishnan

On the judicial record

A generalist High Court judge whose corpus ranges across land, insolvency, family and administrative law, including a cross-border case on recognising foreign bankruptcy orders under section 104 of the Insolvency Act 1967.

Justice Raja Segaran a/l S. Krishnan sits in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), and the reported decisions in this corpus cover an unusually broad civil range, with several matters arising in Melaka. Land law recurs strongly: applications for an order for sale of charged land under sections 256 and 257 of the National Land Code, where the central question is the meaning of 'cause to the contrary' under section 256(3) and the scope of the court's inquiry, and forfeiture of land for non-payment of quit rent (cukai tanah).

Insolvency and company work is well represented. Decisions address winding up by petition, including strict compliance with the advertisement requirement in rule 24 of the Companies (Winding-Up) Rules 1972, and a striking cross-border insolvency matter in which the court considered whether a Malaysian court may act in aid of a Singapore bankruptcy under section 104 of the Insolvency Act 1967, exercising an auxiliary jurisdiction to recognise foreign bankruptcy orders.

The docket also reaches family and religious-status questions — variation of a child-custody order where the welfare of the child is the paramount consideration, and the recognition of a foreign decree of divorce, examined against the settled conditions for recognising a foreign matrimonial judgment. Administrative law appears through judicial-review leave applications, where the threshold is whether the applicant has shown an arguable case that is not frivolous or vexatious. Contract disputes include a friendly-loan claim decided on the sufficiency of proof where the alleged cash advance lacked receipts or contemporaneous financial records, and procedure questions arise on the proper scope of a default judgment under Order 13 as between liquidated demands and claims for declaratory or equitable relief. A further group of decisions concerns religious status, including the conversion to Islam of a minor registered as a Muslim during minority on a parent's consent, and the appellate standard a High Court applies on a first appeal after full trial, where intervention is confined to findings that are 'plainly wrong'. The judgments portray a generalist trial judge comfortable across land, insolvency, family, religious-status, administrative and contract law, resolving each dispute by close attention to the governing statutory provision and the evidence actually before the court.