Kemas Maju Construction Sdn Bhd

On the court record

Illustrates how a payment dispute between two contractors is resolved through CIPAA 2012 adjudication and its narrow avenues of challenge and enforcement.

Kemas Maju Construction Sdn Bhd appears in the reported judgments as a construction company at the centre of a set of connected adjudication proceedings under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012, litigated in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi). Its dispute with a counterparty contractor generated parallel applications to set aside and to enforce a single adjudication decision, heard together.

The company's challenge to the adjudication decision rested on two principal grounds: that the adjudicator had failed to act impartially and independently, and that the adjudicator had acted in excess of his jurisdiction in arriving at his conclusion in the adjudication proceedings. Those are among the recognised bases for setting aside an adjudication decision under section 15 of the 2012 Act, directed at the integrity and jurisdictional limits of the fast-track process rather than at the correctness of the outcome.

The court's reasoning, as recorded in the catchwords, was that the company had failed to establish the ground under section 15(b) of the 2012 Act, and that there was no ambiguity in relation to the due dates of the payments claimed by the counterparty — the company not having denied that, at the time the payment claim was issued, all the payment invoices were already due for payment. That reasoning goes to the core of adjudication practice: an adjudicator's decision will not be set aside merely because the losing party disputes it, and a bare allegation of bias or excess of jurisdiction must be made out on proper grounds. The parallel enforcement proceeding, brought by the counterparty, reflects the pay-now-argue-later policy of the Act, under which an adjudicated sum is ordinarily enforced as an order of the court unless a valid ground for setting it aside is established. Together the decisions illustrate how a payment dispute between two contractors is resolved through the statutory adjudication regime and its narrow avenues of challenge and enforcement.