Deyvinah Ganesalingam

On the court record

Deyvinah Ganesalingam appears in the corpus in disputes concerning stratified property and its management, together with related civil procedure, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). One High Court matter, appearing for the defendant, was a procedural application to convert an originating summons into a writ under Order 28 rule 8 of the Rules of Court 2012 — the provision that allows a cause begun by originating summons to continue as if begun by writ, with pleadings delivered, where the nature of the dispute makes that appropriate. A Court of Appeal matter, appearing for the appellant, raised significant questions about the management of a mixed development: the validity of a bifurcated management structure under the Building and Common Property (Maintenance and Management) Act 2007 and the Strata Management Act 2013, and specifically whether a developer and the commercial parcel owners were legally entitled to institute a separate regime for the management and maintenance of the commercial parcels and their common property, thereby confining the Joint Management Body to the residential parcels and their appurtenant common property. A third matter, in the High Court and appearing for the applicant, was a judicial review of a decision of the Strata Management Tribunal, where a management corporation had discovered that a unit owner had installed a glass curtain on a balcony without approval; the questions were whether this breached By-Law 27 of the Strata Management (Maintenance and Management) Regulations 2015, whether it changed the facade and appearance of the building in breach of Regulations 11 and 29, and whether the Tribunal's decision was irrational in taking irrelevant factors into account. Taken together the matters cover the governance of shared property from several angles at once — the allocation of management responsibility between a Joint Management Body and a separate commercial regime, the enforcement of by-laws against an individual proprietor's alteration to a balcony, and the procedural choice between originating summons and writ where facts are genuinely in dispute. The profile is that of counsel with a distinct concentration in strata-management law and the governance of shared property.