STANDARD CHARTERED SAADIQ BERHAD

On the court record

An Islamic bank litigating foreclosure and orders for sale, the functus officio limits on setting them aside, and the appellate and limitation standards governing summary judgment under the Limitation Act 1953.

Standard Chartered Saadiq Berhad is an Islamic banking institution, and it appears in the corpus in the enforcement and procedural litigation of a secured lender — foreclosure and orders for sale, the setting aside of default judgments, and appeals on summary judgment and limitation. It appears as applicant, respondent, defendant and plaintiff in the High Court.

Foreclosure and the finality of orders are recurring themes. In a Malay-language matter concerning "prosiding halang tebus" (foreclosure proceedings), the bank sought to deal with an application to set aside a default judgment and an order for sale entered without the defendant's presence, the questions being whether the court was functus officio to hear such an application, whether the defendant ought instead to have appealed, and whether service by registered post was valid. A parallel English-language matter raised the same functus officio problem: whether a judge is functus officio after an order for sale has been granted, whether an application to set it aside was filed out of time, and whether the order for sale had been properly served.

The bank's litigation also engages the standards governing summary disposal and limitation. In one appeal the court considered the applicable appellate standard on an appeal against summary judgment and against the striking out of a counterclaim — whether the exercise was a re-hearing or a review of discretion — and whether a genuine triable issue had been raised, drawing the distinction between the limbs of Order 18 rule 19(1) of the Rules of Court 2012. In a striking-out matter, the court treated a claim as obviously unsustainable if barred by section 6(1)(a) of the Limitation Act 1953, contractual and tortious claims being time-barred six years after the right to bring the action arose, subject to the extension in section 6A(2) for certain negligence claims. The bank's footprint is a compact map of the procedural battleground of secured lending.