Khong Mei-Yan

On the court record

The reported matters concentrate on appellate employment and company-law disputes, from the reach of the Industrial Court over non-employer entities to shareholding claims outside a written agreement, grounded in Court of Appeal judgments.

Khong Mei-Yan's reported matters are appellate and commercial, argued before the Court of Appeal and, in the industrial-relations sphere, alongside the team at Messrs Louis Ambrose & Partners. A significant group of appeals arose from an industrial dispute in which employees complained of dismissal without just cause or excuse, with their representations referred to the Industrial Court under section 20(3) of the Industrial Relations Act. The appellate questions were unusual and doctrinally important: whether section 29(a) could be used to substitute or join a non-employer entity, whether the Industrial Court could disregard separate legal personality to secure a remedy for employees, and how the equitable jurisdiction of the industrial tribunal sits against the Salomon principle of corporate separateness. She appeared in these related appeals, which pitted the reach of industrial justice against corporate-law orthodoxy.

The second strand is a company and shareholder dispute. In related Court of Appeal appeals concerning a joint-venture company governed by a shareholders' agreement, the central issue was whether an individual appellant could assert a collateral understanding entitling him to hold shares directly in the joint-venture company, notwithstanding that the governing agreement had been signed by corporate entities. She acted for the appellant in those appeals, in which the respondents included the joint-venture and marine-services companies party to the agreement.

Across these decisions the reported work is concentrated at the appellate level and in two adjoining fields: employment and industrial relations, where the questions reach the limits of the Industrial Court's power over non-employer entities, and company law, where the dispute concerns shareholding and the enforceability of understandings outside a written shareholders' agreement. A thread running through both groups of appeals is the tension between form and substance in corporate arrangements, whether separate legal personality can be set aside to reach a non-employer entity, or whether an understanding outside a signed shareholders' agreement can be enforced against the corporate parties to it. The matters were argued before the Court of Appeal of Malaysia at Putrajaya.