Alliance Investment Bank Berhad

On the court record

An investment bank litigating as a creditor — resisting a scheme of arrangement as an abuse of process, assessing damages after security was declared void, and enforcing a judgment through bankruptcy.

Alliance Investment Bank Berhad appears in the corpus in company and insolvency litigation as a creditor — scheme-of-arrangement disputes, the assessment of damages following the invalidation of security, and bankruptcy enforcement. It appears as appellant, respondent and judgment creditor across the High Court and Court of Appeal.

The scheme-of-arrangement strand raised questions of abuse of process. At the Court of Appeal the bank challenged the dismissal of its application to set aside an order granting leave to convene a meeting of a scheme of creditors, contending that the leave application was an abuse of process. The questions were whether the High Court judge had erred in dismissing the setting-aside application and whether the leave application, on the ground advanced, amounted to an abuse — the characteristic contest over whether a debtor company's restructuring proposal is a genuine attempt to compromise with creditors or a device to stave them off.

The other strands turn on the recovery of debt. In one matter the assessment of damages arose from an order of the Court of Appeal directing damages to be assessed following its declaration that a novation agreement, a repayment agreement and a guarantee were void, invalid and unenforceable for having been entered into in breach of a collateral arrangement, against the background of a consent order. In another, on two appeals and an application by a judgment debtor, the question was the debtor's attempt to set aside a bankruptcy notice by affidavit and by summons in chambers. The bank's footprint is a study in the creditor's side of company and insolvency law — resisting a scheme of arrangement it regards as abusive, quantifying its loss after security is struck down, and enforcing a judgment through bankruptcy — and in the procedural contests that each of those steps generates. The recurring posture is that of a creditor pressing on every available front — scheme, damages and bankruptcy — to give effect to the security and judgments it holds.