Robert Low

On the court record

Engages the oppression remedy and the boundaries of a damages assessment once liability is fixed, and the interpretation of shareholders' agreements and claims to direct shareholding in joint-venture structures.

Robert Low appears in this corpus in company and commercial litigation. As counsel for the plaintiff in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), he acted in a minority-oppression matter at the stage of assessing damages under section 181 of the Companies Act 1965. The question was a subtle one about the scope of an assessment following a conclusive finding of liability at all three judicial levels: whether the court conducting the assessment could revisit the question of entitlement to damages already determined at the liability stage, or whether it was confined to fixing quantum. In particular, the court considered whether the words "if any" in the earlier court order re-opened the question of entitlement or merely qualified the amount. That distinction — between liability already settled and quantum still to be found — is important because it fixes the boundaries of what may be argued at an assessment.

In the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) he acted as counsel for the appellant in a dispute over the shares of a joint-venture company. The corporate participants had signed a shareholders' agreement to govern their relationship, and the questions were whether, on the evidence, the appellant — an individual — could assert the existence of a "collateral understanding" outside the written agreement, and whether the appellant could own shares directly in the joint-venture company. That is a familiar battleground in joint-venture disputes: the tension between the formal allocation of shares in the written documents and an alleged informal understanding said to sit alongside or behind them.

Across these matters, Robert Low's practice engages the oppression remedy and the mechanics of assessing damages once liability is fixed, and the interpretation of shareholders' agreements and claims to beneficial or direct shareholding in joint-venture structures — recurring problems in shareholder and corporate-control litigation. In each, the contest turned on the boundary between what an earlier order or agreement had already settled and what remained genuinely open, a boundary the court had to fix precisely before the parties could know the ambit of the dispute that remained to be tried.