ROADCARE Sdn Bhd

On the court record

A road-maintenance contractor whose litigation is dominated by road-accident negligence claims, testing the duty of care owed by a maintenance concessionaire alongside the highway authority and government.

Roadcare Sdn Bhd is a road-maintenance contractor, and it appears in the corpus almost entirely in negligence litigation arising from road accidents — the recurring question being how far a maintenance concessionaire, alongside the highway authority and government, owes and has breached a duty of care to road users. It appears as respondent and appellant.

The clearest example concerned a tree falling onto a federal road. The court examined whether the public-works authority and the government were liable in negligence for failing to maintain or remove a dangerous tree within the federal road reserve, and whether a local authority's statutory power to trim trees displaced the federal landowner's common-law duty. Other matters were more ordinary road-hazard claims: whether a plastic cone left on a road shoulder made the contractor negligent, resolved on the burden of proof and the balance of probabilities under section 101 of the Evidence Act 1950, with the court weighing conflicting versions and police reports lodged belatedly.

Several appeals were argued in Malay and heard together. In one group of consolidated appeals from the Sessions Court — "3 kes rayuan didengar bersekali" (three appeals heard together) — the cause of action was a damages claim for a road accident in which a motorcyclist was said to have fallen into a rain-covered pothole; the court noted that the plaintiff had "gagal membuktikan wujudnya lubang" (failed to prove the existence of the pothole) beyond patch marks on the road surface. A separate strand touched employment: an appeal under section 20 of the Industrial Relations Act 1967 against an Industrial Court decision that had allowed a claim for unfair dismissal and held that the claimant was the appellants' employee. The unifying question in the accident cases is the allocation of responsibility for road hazards among the several actors who share control of a road — the maintenance contractor, the highway or federal landowner, and the relevant local authority — and how a claimant discharges the burden of proving both the existence of the hazard and the contractor's breach on the balance of probabilities.