SURUHANJAYA KOMUNIKASI DAN MULTIMEDIA MALAYSIA

On the court record

A statutory communications regulator defending its decisions by challenging the procedural foundations of judicial review under the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998.

Suruhanjaya Komunikasi dan Multimedia Malaysia, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, appears in the corpus as a statutory regulator whose decisions and processes are tested in judicial review proceedings.

Two connected matters arose from a judicial review in which the Commission filed a notice of application to set aside an ex parte leave order. The Commission's ground was that the leave order was illegal for being in breach of section 121 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, and that the applicant had failed to make full and frank disclosure. The requirement of full and frank disclosure on an ex parte application is a well-established discipline, and the proceedings turned on whether that duty had been observed and on the statutory precondition in section 121.

A third matter concerned an application by a licensee, in support of its judicial review, for leave to adduce a further affidavit as additional evidence. The Commission, as a respondent, contested the application, arguing that the applicant had failed to aver the relevance of the further affidavit and that the application should be dismissed with costs on an indemnity basis. The court recorded that it found the application had no merit and dismissed it with costs in the cause.

Together the proceedings show the Commission defending its regulatory decisions by challenging the procedural foundations of judicial review, whether through the setting aside of leave for non-disclosure and breach of statutory precondition, or through resisting the late introduction of evidence. The narrative reports the statutory provisions and the procedural issues the courts identified, and states outcomes only as recorded, without offering any view on the substance of the regulatory decisions under challenge or on the parties' wider commercial dispute. The common feature across the matters is the Commission's reliance on the procedural disciplines of judicial review, full and frank disclosure and the relevance of evidence, to resist challenges to its regulatory decisions.