Lim Chinn Wei

On the court record

Lim Chinn Wei appears in the corpus as a revenue and tax specialist, arguing at the highest level in the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan) as well as in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Two Federal Court matters concern the strict construction of sales-tax exemptions and the tax authority. In one, appearing for the appellant, the dispute turned on the interpretation of the Sales Tax (Persons Exempted From Payment of Tax) Order 2018, and in particular the distinction between traders and manufacturers under Items 53 and 57 of Schedule A, the role of internal customs policies and the legitimate-expectation doctrine, and the procedural requirements for claiming exemption — the respondent being the Ketua Pengarah Jabatan Kastam Diraja Malaysia (the Director General of the Royal Malaysian Customs Department). In the second, appearing for the respondent, the questions again concerned the strict and narrow interpretation of an exemption for a registered manufacturer, the single-stage tax principle, the distinction between statutory orders and ministerial letters, and the non-retroactivity of legislative amendments. A third matter, in the Court of Appeal and appearing for the appellant, concerned income tax rather than sales tax: the deductibility of interest expenditure, where the court held that a return of capital received from a real estate investment trust was taxable income, that section 33(1) of the Income Tax Act 1967 does not permit the apportionment of interest expenditure so that a Public Ruling purporting to require apportionment was ultra vires, and accordingly allowed the full deduction of the interest expenditure, setting aside the High Court's decision with costs to the appellant. A striking feature of the income-tax appeal is its treatment of a Public Ruling as ultra vires the statute it purported to interpret: where the Act itself does not permit the apportionment of interest expenditure, an administrative ruling cannot supply that limitation, and the taxpayer was entitled to the full deduction the statute allowed. Across the appearances the practice is that of a dedicated tax litigator engaged with both indirect and direct taxation and with the interpretive principles that govern exemptions, deductions and the status of administrative rulings.