Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on August 21, 2019

PUTRAJAYA: The High Court was right in excluding the government as a defendant in a civil suit over the murder of Mongolian Altantuya Shaariibuu, although two policemen were found guilty of the crime, the Federal Court was told yesterday.

Senior federal counsel Datuk Nik Suhaimi Nik Sulaiman said this when submitting in support of the government’s application to the Federal Court for leave to appeal against the decision of the Court of Appeal to reinstate the government as a party in the civil suit.

Nik Suhaimi raised the question of whether the government is liable under the Government Proceedings Act 1956 when a public officer commits a murder.

He also asked whether a murder committed by a public officer will make the government liable under the Civil Law Act 1956, and whether murder is a cause of action under that provision.

Also representing the government in the leave application are senior federal counsels Norinna Bahadun and Muhammad Azmi Mashud.

Altantuya’s family, led by her father Dr Shaariibuu Setev, filed the RM100 million civil suit over her death in 2007. She was murdered in October 2006. The family is represented by a team of lawyers led by Ramkarpal Singh.

Ramkarpal, in challenging the leave application, argued that the Court of Appeal’s decision to overturn the government’s bid to dismiss the civil suit meant that the case is not “obviously unsustainable” as required under the Rules of Court 2012 to permit a strike-out application. The order relates to strike-out pleadings, where it must be clear through the pleadings that there is no reasonable cause of action by the government as the respondent.

 In a nutshell, this means that the civil suit must prove Altantuya’s murder all over again, making the argument on whether the murder is a cause of action or a tort irrelevant as the matter has not been proven in the civil court.

“We have to go through the entire process [of proving the murder] again, which we are doing now,” Ramkarpal said.

The leave application was heard yesterday by Federal Court Judges Datuk Mohd Zawawi Salleh, who chaired the bench, and Datuk Alizatul Khair Osman Khairuddin and Datuk Nallini Pathmanathan.

Following the hearing of the arguments by both parties, the bench reserved judgement until tomorrow.

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