Chan Yi Zheng

On the court record

Chan Yi Zheng appears in the reported corpus as counsel in commercial and construction disputes carried through both the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan), with a recurring emphasis on how contractual bargains are enforced and how insolvent parties are protected while litigation runs its course. In a Court of Appeal matter between two construction companies, appearing for the respondent, the contest turned on arbitration: whether an award obtained pursuant to a court-ordered reference to arbitration is different in character from an award on a voluntary submission, and whether such an award should be enforced under the Arbitration Act 2005 or instead under section 24A of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964. The same appeal raised a public-policy attack on the underlying subcontract, said to be an 'Ali Baba' arrangement and therefore illegal under section 24 of the Contracts Act 1950 — a reminder that enforcement can fail not on the merits of performance but on the legality of the arrangement itself. A second matter, in the High Court and appearing for the defendant, concerned the boundaries of amendment to pleadings under Order 20 rule 3 of the Rules of Court 2012: whether proposed amendments filed before the close of pleadings could be allowed where they were said to amount to a recantation of an admission of fact and to alter the nature and character of the action. A third High Court matter, this time for the applicant, sat squarely in corporate insolvency, seeking leave nunc pro tunc under section 410(c) of the Companies Act 2016 to continue proceedings against a company under judicial management, and testing whether the court has jurisdiction to grant retrospective leave and whether intervention in the judicial management proceedings is a precondition to seeking it. Across the three matters the practice profile is one of contract, arbitration enforcement, civil procedure and the moratorium mechanics of judicial management.