ERA UNIVERSE DEVELOPMENT Sdn Bhd

On the court record

A housing developer litigating late-delivery LAD claims on summary judgment under a Schedule G contract — including the effect of the Act 829 COVID-19 moratorium — alongside CIPAA adjudication enforcement and setting-aside.

Era Universe Development Sdn Bhd is a housing developer, and its litigation in the corpus centres on purchaser claims for the late delivery of vacant possession, together with the construction-payment adjudication that follows a building project. It appears as appellant, defendant and applicant across the High Court.

The purchaser disputes were largely fought on summary judgment. Several matters were brought under Order 14 of the Rules of Court 2012, argued in Malay as "Penghakiman Terus" (summary judgment), the question being whether the developer's defence raised a bona fide triable issue or amounted to a bare denial. The subject matter was the delayed delivery of vacant possession under a Schedule G statutory sale and purchase agreement and the resulting claim for liquidated ascertained damages, with the court weighing whether the LAD ran on the full purchase price or the price after rebate, and how the moratorium under the Temporary Measures for Reducing the Impact of Coronavirus Disease 2019 Act 2020 (Act 829) affected the computation. A related procedural question was whether the claim ought instead to have been commenced under Order 81 for specific performance or rescission, given the failure to complete construction and deliver possession.

The construction-payment strand engaged the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012. The developer was involved in paired proceedings to enforce an adjudication decision under section 28 and to set it aside under section 15(b) and (d), with the consolidation of those proceedings and whether the adjudicator had acted in excess of jurisdiction in issue. One judgment also carried a methodological observation of wider interest — that the Malaysian courts should not simply refer to English cases but ought to search first for local decisions — placing the developer's routine payment dispute within a broader point about the sources of Malaysian law. The mix of summary-judgment enforcement and contested adjudication captures how a single stalled housing project can generate parallel proceedings, one on the developer's liability to purchasers and another on payment down the construction chain.