Ling Chee Wei

On the court record

Ling Chee Wei appears in the corpus in strata-management disputes, and particularly in contests over the rates of maintenance charges in mixed and commercial developments, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). One High Court matter, appearing for the defendant, was a striking-out application in which the pleading relied on sub-paragraphs (a), (b), (c) and (d) of Order 18 rule 19 cumulatively, raising whether pleading multiple limbs together rendered the application void or ineffective, and whether the action was caught by res judicata because it mirrored objections and judicial review proceedings previously raised and adjudicated before an Appeal Board and the High Court. Two further matters, appearing for the respondent in the Court of Appeal and for the plaintiff at first instance, concerned the same underlying dispute over the rates of maintenance charges imposed on car-park parcels in a commercial development, where a management corporation had passed a resolution at its first annual general meeting imposing multiple rates, the highest of which fell on the plaintiff's car-park parcels, with the stated aim of correcting an unequal allocation of share units. The questions were whether the resolution was ultra vires the Strata Management Act 2013, which contemplates a single rate unless it can be shown under section 60(3)(b) that particular parcels are used for significantly different purposes, and whether the multiple rates were in truth a collateral attack on the allocation of share units; the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal, finding the computation arbitrary and a collateral attempt to redress share-unit inequities, and ordered costs. The dispute is a good illustration of how the strata legislation constrains the freedom of a management corporation to set charges: differential rates cannot be used as a device to correct a perceived imbalance in the allocation of share units, since the Act ties the power to differentiate to a genuine difference in the use of the parcels rather than to the management body's own view of fairness. Across the appearances the practice is concentrated on the governance of stratified developments, the statutory limits on how maintenance charges may be differentiated, and the procedural doctrines that keep repeated challenges within bounds.