Steven Thiru

On the court record

Steven Thiru appears in the reported corpus as appellate and public-law counsel in matters that reach the Court of Appeal and the Federal Court and often carry constitutional or company-law weight. At the apex level he was engaged as appellant's counsel in the Federal Court judicial review concerning Acexide Technology Sdn Bhd and the Industrial Court, which examined the adequacy of an Order 53 statement and the substantive question whether a company director can also be an employee — a "workman" — for the purposes of the Industrial Relations Act 1967. His constitutional practice is visible in a Court of Appeal judicial review brought by Bar Malaysia, which tested the leave threshold for challenging prosecutorial discretion under Article 145(3) of the Federal Constitution and section 254 of the Criminal Procedure Code in the context of a discharge not amounting to an acquittal, and the confines within which such discretion may be reviewed.

His company-law work in the reported matters is substantial. He was engaged in a statutory derivative action under sections 345 to 350 of the Companies Act 2016, where the court considered the complainant status of a former director, the notice requirement in section 348(2), good faith and whether leave should be granted to sue on the company's behalf, and in a judicial-management dispute involving Novabrite Lighting Sdn Bhd and Emrail Sdn Bhd that turned on whether the court could grant leave nunc pro tunc under section 410(c) to continue proceedings despite the moratorium. He also appeared in a land-reference intervention concerning Tenaga Nasional Berhad as paymaster, raising whether a paymaster is a "person interested" under section 37 of the Land Acquisition Act 1960, and in an originating summons engaging sections 58, 63 and 64 of the Mental Health Act 2001. The reported matters mark him as counsel for heavyweight constitutional, judicial-review and corporate disputes.