Dato' Thavalingam C. Thavarajah

On the court record

Dato' Thavalingam C. Thavarajah appears in the reported corpus as employment and industrial-relations counsel, with the reported matters concentrated on the dismissal of senior employees and the judicial review of Industrial Court awards. In one High Court matter he was engaged in a dispute under section 33C of the Industrial Relations Act 1967 concerning the dismissal of a managing director on grounds of alleged redundancy and restructuring, where the court required concrete proof of a genuine redundancy, weighed the influence of an incoming shareholder and a recorded conversation, and considered whether the Industrial Court's findings of fact were plainly wrong before the appeal was dismissed and back wages and compensation in lieu of reinstatement were addressed.

His reported appellate work develops the principles governing the review of dismissals. In a Court of Appeal matter he appeared on a judicial review of a claim for unlawful dismissal against a statutory corporation, where the issue was whether the ultimate decision to dismiss was correct regardless of any complaint of procedural impropriety. In a further cluster of Court of Appeal appeals he was engaged on the reviewability of an Industrial Court award under section 20 of the Industrial Relations Act 1967, the reported reasons confirming that such an award may be reviewed by the High Court for both process and substance on the grounds of illegality, irrationality and procedural impropriety, and that retrenchment is not punitive but a manifestation of management prerogative, with the question of premature dismissal in play. Across these reported decisions he appears for employers and claimants alike in the litigation of dismissal and retrenchment, and the matters mark him as a specialist in industrial-relations and employment judicial review. The reported matters also engaged the boundary between the process and the substance of a dismissal decision — whether procedural shortcomings can vitiate an otherwise correct decision to dismiss — and the deference owed to the Industrial Court's findings of fact unless they are shown to be plainly wrong, a recurring theme in the judicial review of employment awards.