Jacyn Tan Ze Xin

On the court record

Jacyn Tan Ze Xin appears in the corpus as a High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) commercial litigator, with reported matters spanning default judgments, corporate insolvency and minority oppression. One matter, appearing for the appellant, concerned the setting aside of a judgment in default, which the court described as a scenario all too familiar in civil litigation, and which required a careful line to be walked between upholding procedural discipline and ensuring that justice is not sacrificed to technicality; the discretion under the Rules of Court 2012 to set aside a default judgment is not unfettered but must be exercised judiciously and in accordance with well-settled principles and the facts of the particular case. A second matter, appearing for the defendant, was a winding-up dispute engaging the presumption of insolvency: whether a company's failure to satisfy or compound a statutory notice of demand within twenty-one days triggered the deeming provision of inability to pay debts under section 466(1)(a) of the Companies Act 2016, and thereby the ground for winding up under section 465(1)(e), together with the distinction between commercial or cash-flow insolvency and balance-sheet insolvency — so that even an asset-rich company may be wound up if it cannot meet current demands — and the validity of service of the petition at the registered office. A third matter, appearing for the defendant, was a minority-oppression claim under section 346 of the Companies Act 2016 concerning the removal of a plaintiff as director, raising whether there was a right in equity to remain a director in a quasi-partnership where the constitution made no provision for permanent board representation, and whether an oppression action was the proper recourse; the oppression action was dismissed. Across the appearances the practice combines the discipline of default judgments with the tests for winding up and the boundaries of the statutory oppression remedy.