Yap Yeow Han

On the court record

Engages the Fortuna-injunction jurisdiction over disputed debts, the direct-payment remedy under section 30 of CIPAA, and the control of a liquidator's dealings with company assets.

Yap Yeow Han's appearances in this corpus engage insolvency, construction payment and company law. As counsel for the plaintiff in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi), he acted in a matter combining a "Fortuna injunction" with the threatened winding up of the plaintiff. A Fortuna injunction restrains a creditor from presenting or advertising a winding-up petition where the underlying debt is genuinely disputed. The court, in Malay, considered whether "hutang yang dituntut itu masih dalam pertikaian dan pertikaian itu adalah bona fide" (the debt claimed remained in dispute and the dispute was bona fide), the principle permitting a Fortuna injunction, and whether the defendant could prove that the plaintiff was unable to pay its debts.

As counsel for a defendant he acted in a construction-payment matter under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA). The application, made under section 30 of CIPAA, sought an order for the payment of the adjudicated amount directly from the principal — the direct-payment mechanism that allows an unpaid party who has obtained an adjudication decision to recover from a party higher up the contractual chain where the losing party fails to pay.

In the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) he acted as counsel for the appellant in a company matter concerning the setting aside of a liquidator's decision to sell the assets of a company, on an allegation that the sale was at an undervalue. The questions were whether court approval under section 487(3) of the Companies Act 2016 was required, and whether section 517 might be used to set aside a prior order of court granted under section 487(3). Across these matters, Yap Yeow Han's practice engages the Fortuna-injunction jurisdiction over disputed debts, the direct-payment remedy under section 30 of CIPAA, and the control of a liquidator's dealings with company assets. Each turns on a recurring theme in commercial litigation — the tension between a claimant's wish to enforce a debt swiftly and the protections the law affords a company or a losing party, whether through the requirement that a winding-up debt be undisputed, the statutory conditions attaching to direct payment, or the court's supervision of an asset sale said to be at an undervalue.