Terence Chan Kah Meng

On the court record

The reported matters span commercial-fraud, civil-procedure and defamation work, grounded in High Court and Court of Appeal judgments.

Terence Chan Kah Meng's reported matters cover fraud and the impeachment of judgments, civil procedure and defamation, argued in the High Court and the Court of Appeal. A significant fraud decision concerned the impeachment of a consent order said to have been procured by the conscious and deliberate concealment of material facts, and the setting aside of a judgment on the ground of fraud, including the question of what the test for fraud requires. Appearing for the plaintiff across related Commercial Division suits, the matter engaged the demanding standard a court applies before it will unravel a consent order or judgment for fraud.

Civil procedure features in a matter that raised an unusual point about the limits of the court's powers. There, the question was whether, in civil proceedings, the court could invoke section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code to have a defendant detained for psychiatric observation; appearing for a defendant, the matter tested the boundary between the civil process and a power designed for criminal proceedings.

Defamation completes the profile. In a Court of Appeal matter arising after a full trial, the Judicial Commissioner had found an impugned email to be defamatory of the plaintiff and had rejected the defences of justification and qualified privilege; appearing for the appellants, who included an insurer, the appeal engaged the availability of those defences and the assessment made below. A thread across these decisions is the testing of the integrity of judgments and communications, whether a consent order tainted by concealment, the proper limits of a coercive procedural power, or the truth and privilege of an allegedly defamatory statement, argued in the High Court and before the Court of Appeal of Malaysia. The reported work thus spans commercial fraud, procedure and reputational litigation, grounded in the judgments, with a recurring concern for the standards that must be met before a court will set aside a settled order or find a communication actionable.