Landlord & Tenant

In this practice area

Landlord and Tenant collects the disputes arising from tenancy agreements — the recovery of rent, the termination of a tenancy, and the rights of the parties on holding over. The reasoning is grounded in the Contracts Act 1950 and the general law of landlord and tenant, and the collection reflects both commercial and residential tenancies.

Termination and its consequences are a central subject. Judgments examine the construction of early-termination clauses, including a "notwithstanding" clause said to permit unilateral termination without assigning reasons, and the legitimacy of terminating a fixed-term tenancy before its expiry. The recovery of rent arrears and interest for the tenancy period, and the existence of an express condition of title, recur throughout, together with claims that a purported sale and tenancy arrangement was a sham masking an illegal moneylending transaction.

The collection captures the interaction of tenancy with other doctrines. Judgments consider the lifting of the corporate veil to impose liability for a wrongful termination on the individuals rather than the company, trespass to an access road, and the grant of an Erinford injunction under section 44 of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964 pending an application for leave to appeal. Where a tenancy agreement is found void under section 24 of the Contracts Act 1950, the court's order for the refund of sums paid is stated in the judgment's own terms.

The cases sit predominantly in the High Court, with appeals to the Court of Appeal and the Federal Court on questions of principle. As a whole the area shows how the Malaysian courts enforce the bargain between landlord and tenant — construing termination clauses, ordering the recovery of rent, and settling the rights of the parties on the ending of a tenancy — while remaining alert to arrangements that use the form of a tenancy to disguise something else.