ASIAN ECO TECHNOLOGY PTE. LTD. v DENG YIMING

Facts

Asian Eco Technology Pte Ltd (AET) sued Mr Deng Yiming, claiming that he had wrongfully converted, detained or misappropriated 627 diamond seeds and loose diamonds that AET said it had bought from X Diamond Capital Pte Ltd (XDC), a company Mr Deng controlled. Mr Deng's pleaded defence was that XDC had only lent the diamonds to AET. The court had already granted AET summary judgment in a separate decision.

In opposing summary judgment, Mr Deng filed affidavits, exhibits and submissions relying on a Business Times article, a stock exchange announcement, an anonymous "poison pen" email alleging a personal relationship between one Wu Yongqiang and AET director Ms Samantha Hua Lei, and draft unsigned remuneration committee minutes of AET's parent, Metech International Limited. He used them to assert that Mr Wu controlled Metech and AET and was causing AET to pursue this action to stifle XDC's $4,000,000 claim against Mr Wu in HC/OC 9/2023. XDC had in fact obtained judgment against Mr Wu on 4 July 2023. Some of the same documents had already been expunged in XDC's judicial management application. AET applied in HC/SUM 1991/2023 to strike out or expunge the material, which included a paragraph of the defence and the whole of a supporting affidavit by Xu Kang.

Issues

1. How the striking out and expunging powers in O 9 r 16 and O 15 r 25 of the Rules of Court 2021 should be applied to irrelevant material.
2. Whether the materials were relevant to the action or the summary judgment application.
3. Whether the materials should be expunged as scandalous or an abuse of process, and whether the pleaded paragraph should be struck out.

Holding

Hri Kumar Nair J allowed AET's application in part. All the challenged material was expunged except paragraph 5 of the defence, which was not struck out. Mr Deng was to refile the affected affidavits and submissions with the material removed, and the Xu Kang affidavit was expunged entirely. The affidavits filed in the application were ordered sealed, and costs were left for later.

Reasoning

The judge held that the 2021 rules' grounds of abuse of process and interests of justice absorb the old categories of scandalous, frivolous or vexatious material. They should not be read too widely. Read with the Ideals in O 3 r 1, irrelevant material should be struck out only where that serves a broader purpose, such as removing scandalous allegations, saving trial time and cost, or preventing collateral attacks. Otherwise parties would be encouraged into satellite litigation over peripheral matters.

Mr Deng's counsel accepted the material did not bear on whether the diamonds were sold or lent. Even if Mr Wu controlled AET and benefited from the suit, that raised no triable issue, especially as Mr Deng had not engaged with AET's evidence of purchase, including an audit confirmation he signed. With judgment already entered against Mr Wu, the stifling theory had no basis at the time of the hearing.

The material was also scandalous: it cast aspersions on Mr Wu, Ms Samantha and Metech's management, implying breaches of duty. The anonymous email was particularly egregious; Mr Deng gave no source or grounds for believing it, so it was inadmissible hearsay even in a summary judgment application. Its real purpose was to attack and embarrass his opponents and distract from the lack of a defence, and relying on material already expunged in the earlier proceedings was an abuse of process.

Pleadings, however, are struck out only in plain and obvious cases. Paragraph 5 merely pleaded background facts in reply to AET's own pleading, and expunging the other material dealt with the mischief.

From the judgment