PERKASA JAUHARI Sdn Bhd (IN LIQUIDATION)

On the court record

A liquidation dispute sitting at the intersection of CIPAA 2012 adjudication finality and Companies Act 2016 insolvency, carried from a winding-up petition to linked Court of Appeal appeals.

Perkasa Jauhari Sdn Bhd (in liquidation) appears in the corpus at the intersection of construction-payment law and insolvency law, in a dispute with a counterparty that ran from the High Court to the Court of Appeal.

At first instance in the Johor Bahru High Court, the company succeeded on a winding-up petition against the counterparty founded on unpaid debts said to total some RM3.6 million. The court treated earlier adjudication decisions under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA) as carrying only temporary finality and as superseded by the High Court judgment, which favoured the petitioner. The counterparty's defences, including a claimed set-off and asserted inaccuracies in the statutory demand, were rejected, and the court approved the appointment of a named liquidator with full powers under the Companies Act 2016.

The matter then reached the Court of Appeal, where the company appeared as respondent in linked appeals framed around a question of doctrinal importance. The appeals asked what effect a subsequent final court determination, conclusively reversing an adjudication decision on the merits, has on a winding-up order that had been founded on that adjudication decision. In particular, they examined whether a winding-up order, notwithstanding that the underlying adjudication decision had been extinguished under section 13(c) of CIPAA by a final court determination, could transmute that decision into a binding, permanent debt available as a mutual set-off under section 526 of the Companies Act 2016, and what finally decided by arbitration or the court means for the purpose of section 13(c).

The sequence illustrates how a CIPAA adjudication of temporary finality interacts with a later definitive court ruling once insolvency proceedings supervene. The narrative states the provisions and questions the courts identified and records outcomes only as expressed. The progression from a High Court winding-up order to appellate scrutiny of that order's foundations shows how insolvency relief obtained on an adjudicated debt can remain vulnerable to a later determination on the merits.