Derek Chin Tze Qi

On the court record

Derek Chin Tze Qi appears in the corpus in commercial disputes touching moneylending illegality, the corporate veil and civil procedure, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). One Court of Appeal matter, appearing for the respondent, concerned a licensed moneylender and moneylending agreements, and engaged the interaction between the Moneylenders Act 1951 and the general law of illegality: whether the agreements were void ab initio for statutory illegality, whether the illegality provisions of section 24 of the Contracts Act 1950 applied, and whether restitution was available under section 66 of the same Act. A second matter, in the High Court and appearing for the defendant, was a strike-out under Order 18 rule 19 in a dispute over the storage and safekeeping of goods that were destroyed; the plaintiff's pleaded case attributed responsibility to the first defendant, and the court held that there were no pleaded facts alleging fraud, sham or facade sufficient to lift the corporate veil against a second defendant, that a bare assertion of a single economic unit could not on its own found liability, and the application was allowed. The third matter, again in the High Court and appearing for the plaintiff, concerned an application for leave to amend a defence some nineteen months after the close of pleadings, where the court examined whether there was a cogent explanation for the inordinate delay, whether a change of solicitors and settlement negotiations excused it, and whether the proposed amendments were a tactical reconstruction designed to manufacture triable issues in answer to a summary-judgment application. The amendment matter is a useful counterpoint to the strike-out: where the moneylending and corporate-veil disputes asked whether a claim could stand at all, the amendment application asked whether a party should be permitted, long after the close of pleadings, to reshape its case to meet a summary-judgment threat, with the court weighing delay, the adequacy of the explanation and the good faith of the proposed changes. The profile is that of a commercial litigator working across illegality, corporate-veil doctrine and the discipline of pleadings.