Dato' Harihanan Tara Singh

On the court record

Dato' Harihanan Tara Singh appears in the corpus as an appellate advocate in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan), across a group of related appeals that share a single, recurring theme: whether apparent sale-and-purchase transactions over land were in truth sham transactions concealing illegal moneylending. Appearing for the appellant companies in each, the appeals asked whether transactions structured as genuine sales of land were in reality illegal moneylending arrangements disguised in the form of conveyances; whether it is appropriate for a court to look behind the documents and scrutinise the substance of the transactions once an allegation of unlicensed moneylending is raised; whether the equitable maxims in pari delicto potior est conditio defendentis and ex turpi causa non oritur actio operate to deny relief where both parties are implicated in an illegal arrangement; and whether the trial court had been plainly wrong in the conclusions it reached on those questions. The tension at the centre of the appeals is a familiar one in Malaysian moneylending litigation — the courts' willingness to pierce the label a transaction wears in order to give effect to the prohibition on unlicensed lending under the Moneylenders legislation, balanced against the reluctance to assist a party who is itself a participant in the illegality. Because the appeals arose from the same underlying facts and were heard together, they show one substantial contest fought across parallel proceedings, with the appellant companies challenging findings that their dealings were disguised loans. The appeals also engaged the standard of appellate review itself, since the appellant companies had to persuade the Court of Appeal not merely that a different view was possible but that the trial court had been plainly wrong in characterising the dealings as disguised loans — a demanding threshold where the findings rest on an assessment of the substance of documents and the conduct of the parties. The profile is that of counsel concentrated on the illegality and moneylending dimension of land and finance disputes, and on the appellate standard for disturbing a trial court's findings of fact and characterisation.