Michael Chow Keat Thye

On the court record

Michael Chow Keat Thye appears in the reported corpus as a commercial and civil-litigation practitioner, with civil procedure, company governance and defamation among the reported matters across the High Court and Court of Appeal. His civil-procedure work is visible in an application for leave to file a further affidavit after the exchange of affidavits and submissions, where the court considered whether the delay had been satisfactorily explained and whether the evidence was truly new, relevant and necessary, and in a striking-out application under Order 18 rule 19(1) of the Rules of Court 2012, where trade creditors had brought personal claims in fraud, breach of duty and asset dissipation against corporate directors and controllers who applied to strike out the statement of claim.

His company work appears in a cluster of Court of Appeal appeals on the doctrine of deemed retirement — whether a director due to retire by rotation under a company's articles of association can be deemed to have retired where the annual general meeting was not held and the retiring directors were not re-elected. On the reputational side he was engaged in a defamation action in which a businessman had been called a "conman", where the court examined the absence of particulars of the reach and extent of the plaintiff's influence, the overlapping nature of the claims for general, exemplary and aggravated damages save for the added elements of vindictiveness and malice, and made a rolled-up award. Across these reported decisions he moves between the procedural machinery of commercial litigation, the internal governance of companies and the law of defamation, and the matters mark Michael Chow Keat Thye as counsel across company and general civil litigation. Across these reported decisions his work moves between the procedural gateways that decide whether a claim survives, the fiduciary and governance duties owed by directors, and the assessment of damages in reputational disputes, marking a practice rooted in company and general civil litigation and equally at home with the interlocutory skirmish and the trial.