Joycelyn Goh

On the court record

The reported decisions document probate, corporate-restructuring and commercial-conspiracy work, grounded in judgments of the Commercial Division of the High Court and the Court of Appeal.

Joycelyn Goh's reported matters move between probate, corporate restructuring and commercial litigation, argued in the High Court at Kuala Lumpur and before the Court of Appeal. A striking decision is a Court of Appeal probate matter concerning the validity of a will, where the issues were the testator's knowledge and approval of its terms, whether suspicious circumstances surrounded its making, and whether the testator had been subject to undue influence. Appearing for the appellant, the Court found that the trial judge had fallen into error and had lacked judicial appreciation of the evidence, and it allowed the appeal, set aside the High Court order and ordered costs of RM130,000 here and below.

The corporate-restructuring strand appears in a High Court originating summons at Kuala Lumpur raising whether a court can set aside an earlier order that had sanctioned a scheme of arrangement under section 366 of the Companies Act 2016, a question on which two schools of authority exist as to the court's jurisdiction after a sanction order. She acted for the applicants in that matter.

Commercial and company litigation completes the profile. In a Commercial Division suit she appeared for defendants facing a claim in unlawful means conspiracy and breach of fiduciary duty, where the pleaded issues included the particularisation of the conspiracy, constructive trust, and res judicata under the rule in Henderson v Henderson. In a further Commercial Division matter concerning a shareholders' agreement, the disputed questions ran to default and default-sale notices and whether the relevant clauses infringed the pari passu and anti-deprivation rules. A recurring thread across the commercial matters is the deployment of finality doctrines, from the rule in Henderson v Henderson to the limits on reopening a sanctioned scheme, to test whether a claim or a challenge should be allowed to proceed at all. Across these decisions the work reaches contested probate, schemes of arrangement under the Companies Act 2016 and shareholder and conspiracy litigation, argued at first instance in the Commercial Division of the High Court at Kuala Lumpur and on appeal before the Court of Appeal.