Lim Poh Leong

On the court record

The reported matters span judicial review of public procurement and company-governance disputes over director retirement, grounded in High Court and Court of Appeal judgments.

Lim Poh Leong's reported matters combine public-law judicial review with company-law disputes about the governance of directors, argued in the High Court and the Court of Appeal. On the public-law side, the profile includes an application for leave to commence judicial review challenging a decision to award a government supply contract to a third party, where the applicant had itself previously supplied hologram labels to a ministry. Appearing for the applicant, the Court took the view that the conduct of a tender process leading to the award of a contract is not amenable to judicial review, and leave to commence proceedings was refused.

The company-law strand is a group of related Court of Appeal appeals concerning the deemed retirement of directors. The questions were whether a company director due to retire by rotation under the articles of association is deemed to retire, and to be re-elected or not, where no annual general meeting has been held. Appearing for the appellant across the related appeals, the Court of Appeal set aside the decisions of the High Court in the underlying originating summonses and allowed the appeals with costs to the appellant.

Taken together the reported work sits at the meeting point of administrative law and corporate governance: on one side, the limits of judicial review over public procurement and the amenability of a tender award to challenge; on the other, the internal constitutional arrangements of a company, including retirement by rotation, the effect of a failure to hold an annual general meeting, and the re-election of retiring directors. A thread linking the two is the supervision of decision-making power: in the public sphere, how far the courts will review the exercise of a statutory power to award a contract, and in the private sphere, how the courts read a company's own constitution to determine who holds office when the required meeting has not taken place. The matters were argued in the High Court at Kuala Lumpur and before the Court of Appeal of Malaysia at Putrajaya.