Menteri Kewangan Malaysia

On the court record

The Minister of Finance as respondent in judicial reviews of fiscal and trade powers — anti-dumping duties, customs remissions and BAFIA approvals — testing the exercise of statutory discretion against the courts' supervisory jurisdiction.

Menteri Kewangan Malaysia (the Minister of Finance) appears in the corpus as a respondent in administrative-law challenges to the exercise of fiscal and trade-regulatory powers — anti-dumping duties, customs remissions and financial-sector approvals — reflecting the Minister's role at the apex of a range of statutory decision-making. The disputes run through the High Court, Court of Appeal and Federal Court.

Anti-dumping duty is a recurring subject. In one line of litigation the question was the legality of imposing anti-dumping duty on imported cellulose cement fibre products from a company in Thailand, and whether such duty could be imposed on the basis of a previous or one-off preliminary determination of dumping and injury. A related matter concerned anti-dumping duties on fibre boards used in construction under the Customs (Anti-Dumping Duties) Order 2014 read with the Customs Duties Order 2017, and whether there was a duty to give reasons for the decision.

Other challenges targeted customs and financial-sector decisions. One judicial review concerned the Minister's refusal to grant a remission, the applicant arguing that the Minister had failed to consider wrongful acts of the Director General of Customs and that there had been no appeal against the bills of demand. A dispute over a licensed manufacturing warehouse under sections 65 and 65A of the Customs Act 1967 concerned deliveries of raw materials between warehouses. In the financial sphere, a matter engaged section 49(1)(b) of the Banking and Financial Institutions Act 1989 (BAFIA), where the Minister had given a blanket approval for the purchase of non-performing loans. Several matters also raised threshold questions of leave and whether applications had been filed out of time. Across them, the Minister stands as the ultimate administrative decision-maker whose exercise of statutory discretion is tested against the supervisory jurisdiction of the courts. The through-line is the supervisory review of high-level fiscal and trade decisions, in which the adequacy of the reasons given and the timing of any challenge matter as much as the substance.