RAKAN SETIA HOUSING Sdn Bhd

On the court record

Illustrates how the courts supervise the Tribunal for Homebuyer Claims on judicial review, confine a developer's challenge to genuine questions of legality, and give effect to the statutory scheme protecting purchasers against late delivery of vacant possession.

Rakan Setia Housing Sdn Bhd appears in this corpus as a housing developer, and in every reported matter it is the applicant in judicial review, seeking an order of certiorari (semakan kehakiman — judicial review) to quash an award made against it by the Tribunal for Homebuyer Claims. The decisions therefore sit at the meeting point of administrative law and the statutory regime protecting purchasers of housing accommodation. The recurring complaint before the Tribunal is the late delivery of vacant possession, for which a purchaser claims liquidated damages under the statutory sale and purchase agreement prescribed by the housing-development legislation, and the developer's judicial review challenges the Tribunal's award on grounds such as an error of law, a want of jurisdiction or a failure to consider a relevant matter. The court's task in these cases is not to retry the purchaser's claim but to review the legality of the Tribunal's decision within the confines of Order 53 of the Rules of Court 2012, and several of the developer's applications were dismissed with costs where no reviewable error was shown. Because the Tribunal is a specialised body established to give homebuyers a swift and inexpensive remedy, the corpus illustrates the tension between that protective purpose and the developer's insistence that the Tribunal acted outside its powers. The matters are decided in the High Court exercising its supervisory jurisdiction. Collectively the decisions in which Rakan Setia Housing is a party illustrate how the courts supervise the Tribunal for Homebuyer Claims on judicial review, confine the developer's challenge to genuine questions of legality rather than the merits of the liquidated-damages award, and give effect to the statutory scheme protecting purchasers against the late delivery of vacant possession. Several of the reported matters also address the standard of review the court applies to a specialised tribunal and the limited grounds on which its award may be disturbed, so that the decisions reinforce the boundary between review and appeal in the homebuyer-protection scheme. Across these matters the developer appears as the party repeatedly testing the legality of the Tribunal's awards, and the corpus records the courts declining to intervene where the Tribunal acted within its powers.