BOILERMASTER Sdn Bhd

On the court record

A company deploying Quia Timet and Fortuna injunctions and a section 16 CIPAA stay to resist enforcement of an adjudication award and a winding-up demand, testing the limits of each against CIPAA's swift-payment regime.

Boilermaster Sdn Bhd appears in the corpus in construction-payment litigation in which the recurring question is how a paying party can hold off enforcement of an adjudication award while the underlying dispute is contested. It appears as plaintiff, applicant and respondent in the High Court.

The matters revolve around a single adjudication award and the injunctions and stays deployed around it. Having had an earlier application for a Quia Timet injunction dismissed, the company later sought a Fortuna injunction to restrain the respondent from acting on a statutory notice issued on the strength of the adjudication award, which raised whether that fresh application was an abuse of process barred by res judicata. The Quia Timet application had itself been directed at an enforcement order obtained under section 28 of the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 and at a statutory notice under section 466(1)(a) of the Companies Act 2016 — the winding-up demand that an unpaid adjudication creditor can wield.

The company also sought a stay of the adjudication decision under section 16 of CIPAA. The court's treatment of that application is instructive: the stay is discretionary, the existence of parallel court proceedings is a threshold but not a determinative factor, and the applicant must generally show a "clear and unequivocal error" to disturb the adjudicator's decision. Taken together, the company's appearances trace the defensive toolkit of a party against whom an adjudication decision has been made — the Quia Timet and Fortuna injunctions to head off a winding-up demand, and the statutory stay to suspend enforcement — and the limits the courts place on each. It is a compact illustration of the pressure that CIPAA's swift-payment regime brings to bear on a paying party, and of the narrow grounds on which that pressure can be resisted before the merits are finally determined in the ordinary courts or in arbitration.