Sim Hui Chuang

On the court record

Sim Hui Chuang appears in the reported corpus as counsel across native land rights, company law and arbitration, at the Court of Appeal and Federal Court. His native-title work is visible in a set of Court of Appeal appeals on Native Customary Rights, where the reported questions were whether the plaintiff had proven Native Customary Rights, whether a map put forward by the plaintiff should be given weight, whether inadequate reasons given by the High Court warranted appellate interference, and whether alienation extinguishes Native Customary Rights and bars rectification of title — a matter at the heart of the tension between customary land tenure and the registered-title system.

His company work reaches the apex court. He was engaged in the Federal Court proceedings involving WTK Realty Sdn Bhd and Southwind Plantation Sdn Bhd, which raised whether there had been a contravention of section 132D(1) of the Companies Act such that the issuance and allotment of the impugned shares in the companies concerned were null and void, and whether the court ought instead to validate the issuance under section 63 or section 355 — the familiar battleground of directors' powers, the validity of share allotments and the court's curative jurisdiction in a corporate-control dispute. His arbitration work appears in a Court of Appeal appeal against a High Court decision setting aside an international arbitral award under section 37 of the Arbitration Act 2005, where the issues were whether a valid arbitration agreement existed and whether the tribunal had rightfully exercised its jurisdiction. Across these reported decisions his work spans native customary land, corporate-control litigation and the supervision of arbitral awards, marking Sim Hui Chuang as counsel with an unusually broad appellate practice. The breadth of these reported matters — customary land tenure, a high-value corporate-control dispute and the supervision of an international arbitral award — marks an appellate practice that ranges widely, and one comfortable arguing both first principles of land tenure and the technical provisions of the Companies Act and the Arbitration Act 2005.