Malik Imtiaz Ahmed

On the court record

Malik Imtiaz Ahmed appears in the corpus in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan), in a group of related appeals concerned with the assessment of damages following an industrial loss. Appearing for the respondent in two of the appeals and the appellant in the other, the matters arose from the same underlying event — damage suffered by a manufacturing concern — and were fought over quantum rather than liability. The heads of loss in issue were substantial and varied: the loss of goods in production and the profits on them, the loss of production and the associated profits, the replacement cost of machinery and other equipment that had been physically damaged, and the cost of repairs. Beyond the measure of these heads, the appeals raised two questions of principle that recur in damages assessments. The first was the court's discretion to award pre-judgment interest, and in particular whether interest should run from the date of the incident or only from the date the claim was filed — a question that can materially affect the total sum recovered where a loss is old. The second was an evidential point of some importance: whether damages could properly be awarded on the strength of documents that had been marked only for identification, as 'ID', rather than formally admitted into evidence, which goes to the rigour with which a claimant must prove each item of loss. Because the appeals flowed from a single loss and were heard together, they represent one closely argued contest over how a commercial claimant's losses are to be measured, from what date they carry interest, and to what evidential standard each component must be established. The evidential point about documents marked only for identification is a recurring trap in damages assessments, because a claimant who has quantified a loss on paper but never formally proved the underlying documents may find those items disallowed however genuine the loss, and the date from which interest runs can be worth as much as the principal where the loss is long-standing. The profile is that of counsel engaged in the appellate assessment of complex commercial and industrial damages.