Selvaratnam

On the court record

Illustrates how the courts reconcile the discovery jurisdiction with statutory secrecy protections in the financial-services context and guard against discovery becoming a speculative search.

Selvaratnam appears in this corpus as counsel for the appellant in a set of discovery appeals decided together in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). The appeals arose from applications for the discovery of documents under Order 24 rules 3 and 7 of the Rules of Court 2012, and the court worked through the requirements of Order 24 rule 3(4) and Order 24 rule 7(3). The recurring question was whether each discovery application was meritorious or was instead a "fishing expedition" — an attempt to obtain documents in the hope of building a case rather than to secure identified documents relevant to a defined issue. The court's task was to distinguish a properly targeted request from an impermissible trawl.

A distinctive feature of these appeals was the interaction between discovery and statutory secrecy. The court considered whether discovery was prohibited by statutory provisions on secrecy, in particular section 43 of the Securities Industry (Central Depositories) Act 1991, which protects certain confidential information held within the central-depository system. That question required the court to weigh a litigant's interest in obtaining relevant documents against a statutory confidentiality regime designed to protect the integrity of the securities market. The appeals also raised the scope of a bank's duty of care to non-customers and the effect of the Financial Services Act 2013.

The respondents to the appeals included financial institutions — an investment bank and securities firms. As counsel for the appellant, Selvaratnam's role was to press the discovery applications against the objections founded on secrecy and on the character of the requests. The matters are a useful illustration of how the courts reconcile the discovery jurisdiction with statutory secrecy protections in the financial-services context, and of the limits the court places on discovery to prevent it from becoming a speculative search for a cause of action.