BADAN PENGURUSAN BERSAMA KONDOMINIUM RBC (Riviera Bay Condominium)

On the court record

A condominium joint management body facing judicial-review challenges to Strata Management Tribunal awards, turning on the Order 53 leave threshold, service of the initiating form, and natural justice.

BADAN PENGURUSAN BERSAMA KONDOMINIUM RBC (Riviera Bay Condominium), a condominium joint management body, appears in the corpus almost entirely as a respondent to judicial-review challenges arising from strata-management disputes, and the matters cluster around the leave stage of Order 53 of the Rules of Court 2012. In two High Court matters the court was asked whether applicants had crossed the threshold for leave — whether they had shown an arguable case fit for full investigation, or whether the applications were frivolous or hopeless — in challenges connected to Strata Management Tribunal awards. One matter also engaged whether a tribunal default award should be quashed for breach of natural justice, and whether the presumption of service of the initiating Borang 1 (Form 1) had been displaced.

Another judicial-review matter arose from a parcel proprietor's attempt to challenge how an annual general meeting and a proprietor's motion had been handled under paragraphs 13(1) and 13(2) of the Second Schedule to the Strata Management Act 2013. A further matter concerned an application to quash a Tribunal decision that had ordered an applicant to pay outstanding maintenance charges, sinking-fund contributions, utilities and insurance charges, the applicant seeking certiorari against that determination under the Building and Common Property (Maintenance and Management) Act 2007, the Strata Management Act 2013 and the accompanying 2015 Regulations.

For an analytics reader, the appearances are a compact illustration of how strata disputes reach the High Court: not by fresh action but by judicial review of Tribunal awards, where the decisive contests are the arguability threshold for leave, service of the initiating form, and natural justice before the Tribunal. The joint management body is named as it appears on the record; the individual proprietors are referred to by their procedural role only. The concentration of these matters at the judicial-review leave stage is itself telling: strata disputes are designed to be resolved cheaply and quickly by the Strata Management Tribunal, and the High Court's role is a supervisory one exercised sparingly, so that a proprietor dissatisfied with a Tribunal award must first show a genuinely arguable case before the court will examine the award at all.