Siew Choon Jern

On the court record

Siew Choon Jern appears in the reported corpus as a company and civil litigator, with shareholder disputes, winding up and probate among the reported matters across the High Court and Court of Appeal. His insolvency work is visible in a winding-up petition under section 465(1)(h) of the Companies Act 2016, where the question was whether it was just and equitable to wind up the companies for the loss of substratum, a breakdown in management and a deadlock between shareholders and directors, against a backdrop of allegations over unaudited financial statements. He was also engaged as respondent's counsel in a cluster of Court of Appeal appeals on minority oppression — whether removal from management with shares locked in was oppressive, whether a pending suit for misconduct against the minority barred an oppression action, whether the sale of shares to a new investor terminated a quasi-partnership, and whether a valuation expert should be subject to cross-examination.

His reported work also reaches the law of succession and family litigation. In one matter the court was asked to determine whether the contents of three safe-deposit boxes belonging to a deceased should be distributed according to her last will, and in a family matter he was engaged on a second discovery application filed by a husband some years after the first and after the reply and cross-petition, raising whether there had been undue delay. Across these reported decisions his work moves between corporate deadlock and oppression, the administration of a deceased's estate, and the procedural conduct of matrimonial litigation, marking Siew Choon Jern as counsel across company, probate and family disputes, at home both with the substantive law of shareholder protection and with the interlocutory battles that shape how such disputes are resolved. Across these reported decisions the recurring thread is the point at which a private falling-out overwhelms a corporate or family structure — a deadlocked company pushed into winding up, a contested estate, a matrimonial discovery fight — and the procedural tools through which each is pressed or resisted before the court.