GREAT EASTERN LIFE ASSURANCE BERHAD

On the court record

A life insurer whose matters map policy-avoidance doctrine under Schedule 9 of the Financial Services Act 2013: the pre-contractual duty of disclosure, misrepresentation categories, and utmost good faith.

GREAT EASTERN LIFE ASSURANCE (MALAYSIA) BERHAD, a life insurer, appears in the corpus as a defendant in a run of policy-avoidance disputes, and its matters are a concentrated study of the pre-contractual duty of disclosure. In one High Court matter the court examined an insurer's avoidance of a policy under Schedule 9 of the Financial Services Act 2013, addressing material non-disclosure, deliberate and reckless misrepresentation, the statutory presumption in paragraph 7(8), and a waiting-period exclusion clause, against medical findings said to bear on the proposer's health at the time of application. In another matter a policyholder's claim for medical treatment and hospitalisation was repudiated, the court considering whether the plaintiff had failed to make full disclosure of material facts and whether the insurer was entitled to repudiate, again by reference to the disclosure provisions of Schedule 9.

A further matter concerned life-insurance contracts and the duty of utmost good faith (uberrimae fidei), where the court considered whether the insured had made false declarations regarding income and occupation, whether such misrepresentations justified policy avoidance, and the admissibility of investigation reports in an early-death claim. The company also appears as a respondent in a matter connected to the administration of a deceased estate.

For a reader, the cluster is an unusually clean map of insurance-avoidance doctrine in Malaysia after the Financial Services Act 2013: the statutory pre-contractual duty of disclosure under Schedule 9, the categories of deliberate, reckless and innocent misrepresentation, and the enduring principle of utmost good faith in life cover. The insurer is named as it appears on the record; the individual policyholders, proposers and estate parties are referred to by their procedural role only. The consistency of the insurer's defences across these matters — each turning on the proposer's or insured's disclosure at the point of application — makes the cluster a useful illustration of how the Financial Services Act 2013 recast the pre-contractual duty of disclosure, distinguishing deliberate and reckless misrepresentation from innocent non-disclosure and attaching different consequences, while preserving the overarching principle of utmost good faith in life cover.