Perbadanan Putrajaya

On the court record

A public corporation's construction-payment dispute where the set-aside, stay and enforcement mechanisms of CIPAA 2012 were argued together over one adjudication decision.

Perbadanan Putrajaya (Putrajaya Corporation) appears in the corpus in a connected set of construction-payment proceedings arising from a single adjudication decision under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA).

Three originating summonses were heard together before the same court. In the first, the corporation applied under section 15(b) and (d) of CIPAA to set aside an adjudication decision that had been given in favour of a development company. In the second, the corporation applied under section 16 of CIPAA to stay that adjudication decision. In the third, the successful claimant applied under section 28 of CIPAA to enforce the adjudication decision. Hearing the three together allowed the court to address, in one exercise, the full range of statutory responses that a paying party and a claimant may deploy once an adjudicator has decided a payment dispute.

The statutory architecture that the proceedings engage is characteristic of CIPAA disputes: adjudication produces a decision of temporary finality, which the losing party may seek to set aside on limited grounds or to stay, while the winning party may seek to convert the decision into an enforceable order. The corporation, as the paying party, occupied the applicant's role on the set-aside and stay applications and the respondent's role on the enforcement application.

Because the same adjudication decision underlay all three summonses, the matter is a useful illustration of how the set-aside, stay and enforcement mechanisms interact when a public body resists payment following adjudication. The narrative confines itself to the statutory provisions the court identified and to the procedural posture of the parties; the court's operative orders are stated only as recorded, and no wider commentary on the merits of the payment dispute is offered. Because a public body was the paying party resisting an adjudicated sum, the proceedings also illustrate how a government-linked corporation engages the CIPAA regime on the same statutory footing as any other employer in a construction-payment dispute.