PLP ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING Sdn Bhd

On the court record

A contractor whose CIPAA matters show the paired enforcement and setting-aside contest over an adjudication decision and the purposive construction of the statute's payment provisions, including the meaning of "invoice".

PLP ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING Sdn Bhd, an electrical-engineering contractor, appears in the corpus through construction-adjudication matters under the Construction Industry Payment and Adjudication Act 2012 (CIPAA) with the main contractor Kerjaya Prospek (M) Sdn Bhd, and its appearances illustrate the setting-aside, stay and enforcement contest over an adjudication decision. In connected matters the company appears as both applicant to enforce the decision under section 28 and respondent to the paying party's attempts to set it aside under section 15(b) and (d) and to stay it, the disputes engaging late-payment interest, the second moiety of the retention sum, the non-issuance of a Certificate of Making Good Defects, and an indemnity cross-claim against a liquidated-ascertained-damages claim.

A notable point of construction in the matters is whether the term "invoice" under section 36(4) of CIPAA is to be read purposively to include payment certifications issued by a project consultant — a question that goes to the reach of the statute's payment machinery. The court's treatment of that question, alongside the retention sum and the Certificate of Making Good Defects, shows how CIPAA's provisions are applied to the practical mechanics of a construction payment.

For a reader, the cluster is a focused study of CIPAA enforcement between a sub-contractor and a main contractor: the paired enforcement and setting-aside applications over a single decision, the narrow grounds on which an adjudication decision may be disturbed, and the purposive construction of the statute's payment provisions. The corporate parties are named as they appear on the record; any individuals are referred to by their procedural role only. The company's CIPAA matters show a sub-contractor and main contractor bringing their competing applications over a single adjudication decision, and the disputes turn on both the narrow grounds for disturbing such a decision and the purposive reading of the statute's payment machinery — including whether a consultant's payment certification counts as an invoice — which determines how far the adjudication regime reaches into the mechanics of a construction payment.