MUDAJAYA CORPORATION BERHAD

On the court record

A construction company litigating CIPAA adjudication and adjudication-founded winding-up pressure, and raising a general natural-justice question about the right to an oral hearing after written submissions.

Mudajaya Corporation Berhad is a construction and engineering company, and it appears in the corpus in the by-now familiar combination of construction-payment adjudication, winding-up pressure and contractual disputes. It appears as applicant, respondent, petitioner, plaintiff and intervener across the High Court and Court of Appeal.

Adjudication under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 is central. The company was involved in applications to set aside and enforce an adjudication decision under sections 15(b), 15(d) and 28, the court examining the scope of its supervisory jurisdiction, whether the adjudicator had acted in excess of jurisdiction, and whether the adjudicator had denied a party natural justice. The insolvency dimension appeared in a winding-up petition founded on an adjudication decision in the petitioner's favour, where the resisting party contended that the debt was bona fide disputed and complained of concealment, misrepresentation and the disclosure of without-prejudice communications, with a competing motion to appoint private liquidators.

Beyond construction payment, the company litigated contractual and procedural questions. In one suit it sought to establish the enforceability of three sale and purchase agreements, the court deciding that the dispute could be resolved on legal argument from the documents. As an intervener in the Court of Appeal it was concerned with a point of general procedural importance — whether the second rule of natural justice mandatorily requires the court to give parties an oral hearing where written submissions have already been filed, and the effect on a decision of any breach of that rule. Taken together, the company's appearances place it within the machinery of construction dispute resolution while also engaging broader questions about natural justice and the fair conduct of proceedings. The company's disputes therefore sit at the meeting point of construction-payment enforcement and the broader procedural guarantees that govern a fair and properly conducted hearing.