Datuk Wan Shaharuddin Bin Wan Ladin

On the court record

Datuk Wan Shaharuddin Bin Wan Ladin appears in the reported corpus as counsel for the prosecution in serious criminal litigation at the appellate level. At the Federal Court he was engaged as appellant's counsel in a prosecution appeal against the decision of the Court of Appeal on four criminal charges faced by the respondent, the matter reaching the apex court on the prosecution's challenge to the intermediate court's disposal of those charges. His appellate prosecution work is also visible in a Court of Appeal matter concerning convictions for criminal breach of trust and the dishonest misappropriation of property under sections 405 and 403 of the Penal Code, argued together with a money-laundering charge under section 4(1)(b) of the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001 and questions of abetment.

Appearing for the prosecution, his reported work engages the state's task of sustaining or restoring convictions on appeal: defending the trial court's findings on the elements of criminal breach of trust — entrustment, dishonest misappropriation and the fiduciary character of the relationship — and the linkage between the predicate offence and the money-laundering charge that so often accompanies it. The Federal Court appeal, brought by the prosecution against a Court of Appeal decision on multiple charges, is characteristic of the highest tier of criminal litigation, where the correctness of an appellate court's intervention in a conviction or acquittal is itself put in issue before the apex court. Across these reported decisions he stands on the prosecution side of the record, and the matters mark him as counsel engaged in appellate criminal prosecution, arguing the reach of the Penal Code and the anti-money-laundering legislation and the standards that govern appellate interference with a trial court's findings. The reported matters, reaching the Federal Court on the prosecution's own appeal, illustrate the state's role not only in securing convictions at trial but in defending or restoring them where an intermediate appellate court has intervened, and the exacting standards that govern such interference.