NAUTICAL SUPREME Sdn Bhd

On the court record

A ship-management company litigating debt recovery and a joint-venture shareholding dispute, alongside Fortuna-injunction and arbitration-stay questions and a novel point on non-sinister inferences.

Nautical Supreme Sdn Bhd appears in the corpus in commercial litigation arising from ship-management services and a joint-venture shareholding, together with the insolvency and arbitration skirmishes that surround such disputes. It appears as respondent, defendant and plaintiff across the High Court, Court of Appeal and Federal Court.

The contractual core concerns ship management. In one High Court suit the company sued to recover sums said to be owed for various periods between 2016 and 2022 under a ship-management services agreement dated 2015. That commercial relationship generated a wider dispute over the ownership of shares in a joint-venture company: in the Court of Appeal the question was whether, the corporate parties having signed a shareholders' agreement to govern their relationship, an individual could nonetheless assert the existence of a "collateral understanding" and own shares directly in the joint-venture company.

The company was also involved in questions of insolvency and arbitration procedure. It faced or invoked a Fortuna injunction to restrain the presentation of a winding-up petition based on a statutory demand under the Companies Act 2016, where the issue was whether the statutory notice was an abuse of process because the debt was disputed and civil proceedings were pending. At the Federal Court a matter concerned an inter partes injunction granted by the High Court to a non-party to restrain an arbitration from continuing, and whether the Court of Appeal had erred in setting that injunction aside, engaging section 10 of the Arbitration Act 2005. A further Court of Appeal matter raised the novel "non-sinister inference" question — whether, where two inferences are equally open on the same facts and neither concerns a witness's credibility, the court should prefer the non-sinister inference. The company's footprint thus mixes routine debt recovery with points of genuine legal novelty. The company's footprint mixes ordinary commercial recovery with points on inference, injunctions and arbitration that reach beyond the immediate parties.