Tang Kim Choong

On the court record

Tang Kim Choong appears in the reported corpus as a commercial and civil-litigation practitioner, with contract, guarantee and conspiracy claims recurring across the High Court. One reported appeal from the Sessions Court concerned a plaintiff suing directors as guarantors after the principal company had been wound up, where the court held that the plaintiff had failed to seek leave under section 471 of the Companies Act 2016 and was required to sue the principal company to ascertain liability. In a summary-judgment matter under Order 14 of the Rules of Court 2012 involving East West Horizon Plantation Berhad, the court considered whether a failure to proceed with a mandatory mediation process before filing suit raised a triable issue, and whether an injunction from another court prohibiting payment did so as well.

A distinctive strand of his reported work is the unmasking of disguised transactions. In a claim for recovery of a service fee he was engaged where the court probed whether a service agreement was enforceable or was in truth the brokering of an illegal moneylending arrangement — a loan at exorbitant interest attracting the rebuttable presumption of a moneylending business under the Moneylenders Act 1951 and the illegality bar in section 24 of the Contracts Act 1950. He also appeared for the defence across a cluster of linked suits involving Euro Holdings Berhad, Ady Marketing Sdn Bhd and All Ways Builder Sdn Bhd, which raised claims for goods and services supplied, liability under guarantees, and allegations that the defendants had conspired jointly to defraud the plaintiff, with third-party and pihak terkilan (aggrieved-party) proceedings folded in. The reported decisions present him as counsel steeped in contract enforcement, guarantee liability, moneylending illegality and commercial conspiracy litigation. In the linked Euro Holdings suits the recurring questions were whether the plaintiff had proven its claim for goods and services supplied, whether the defendants were liable under the guarantees they had given, and whether they had conspired jointly to defraud the plaintiff, with counterclaims and third-party proceedings running alongside the main action.