Gan Yi Yang

On the court record

Gan Yi Yang appears in the corpus in construction-payment and contract disputes, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Two related Court of Appeal appeals, in which Gan Yi Yang appeared for the respondent in one and the appellant in the other, arose from a single adjudication under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012. One side sought to enforce the adjudication decision under section 28 of that Act, while the other sought to set it aside under section 15, and the appeals raised, in addition, a pointed question of civil procedure about the proper parties to the proceedings: whether it was correct to sue a sole proprietor in his own name and to add the business name in brackets beneath it, whether the respondent had been properly named at the adjudication stage, and whether an action could be maintained against a body that has no legal personality. That question of how a sole proprietorship is correctly identified and sued goes to the enforceability of the adjudication decision itself. A third matter, in the High Court and appearing for the defendant, was a contract dispute in which the defendant had acknowledged receipt of the purchase price under a share sale agreement; applying sections 91 and 92 of the Evidence Act 1950 and the treatment of an acknowledgment as an admission under section 17, the court's concern was whether a party who had acknowledged payment in a written instrument could later contradict that written acknowledgment by asserting non-receipt. The pairing of the two related appeals — one to enforce and one to set aside the same adjudication decision — illustrates how a construction-payment dispute can be fought simultaneously from both directions, with the correct identification of the parties operating as a threshold that can determine the fate of the decision regardless of its merits. Across the appearances the practice combines the statutory adjudication regime for construction payment with civil-procedure questions about parties and with the evidentiary rules that govern written contracts.