HARI LUMAYAN Sdn Bhd

On the court record

A compact illustration of the several routes — arbitration, statutory adjudication and enforcement — through which a single construction payment dispute is channelled.

Hari Lumayan Sdn Bhd appears in the reported judgments as a construction-industry party whose disputes cluster tightly around the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 and the arbitration of the underlying contract, litigated in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi). Its matters trace a single project relationship through the successive procedural stages that the statutory-adjudication regime and an arbitration clause create.

In connected proceedings the company and its counterparty engaged the 2012 Act from opposing sides in respect of the same adjudication decision. One application was brought under sections 15(b), (c) and (d) of the Act to set aside the adjudication decision, with the adjudicator's core jurisdiction also put in issue; the mirror application was brought under section 28 to enforce the same decision. That pairing captures the pay-now-argue-later logic of the Act, under which a party dissatisfied with an adjudication decision must ordinarily comply while its set-aside challenge, resting on grounds such as excess of jurisdiction or breach of natural justice, is determined.

An earlier decision in the same relationship concerned a different mechanism entirely: an application under section 10 of the Arbitration Act 2005 for a stay of court proceedings pending arbitration, which was allowed. That order reflects the priority the courts give to a valid arbitration agreement, requiring the parties to resolve their substantive dispute in the forum they chose while the court proceedings are held in abeyance. Read as a sequence, the decisions show how a construction dispute can move from a stay in favour of arbitration to a statutory adjudication and then to the parallel set-aside and enforcement applications that adjudication generates. The company's position across the matters is a compact illustration of the several routes — arbitration, adjudication, and their enforcement — through which construction payment disputes are channelled in Malaysia. For a contractor or employer in the company's position, the practical lesson is that these routes are not mutually exclusive but sequential and overlapping: a dispute may first be diverted from court to arbitration by a stay, then be the subject of a fast-track adjudication on an interim-binding basis, and finally return to court for the parallel contest over whether the adjudication decision should be set aside or enforced. The decisions in which the company features therefore serve as a useful map of how the same underlying payment claim is pursued through successive forums, each with its own threshold and its own limited grounds of challenge.