Casinos Counsel Waiting For Instructions
To Appeal On Ex-CMs Debt
Will he receive an instruction from his clients Ritz
Hotel Casino Ltd and R.H.C Ltd?
Local counsel for the United Kingdom paces anxiously
as he waits for further instructions as to whether he should
file an appeal against the Kota Kinabalu High Court judgment
on his clients’ attempt to recover RM7.14 million in gambling
debts owed by former Sabah Chief Minister Datuk Seri Osu
Sukam.
“I can’t tell you anything yet. I have just faxed the copy of the judgment
to London,” said the firm’s counsel Colin Lau.
This was his response to Bernama when he was asked whether he would file the
notice of appeal in the High Court in Sabah and Sarawak against the High Court’s
decision to dismiss the application by the two foreign casinos and to register
a judgment obtained in the English High Court to recover the huge gambling
debt owed by Osu.
“Anyway, my clients have one month to file a notice of appeal against the judgment
in the Kota Kinabalu High Court,” said Lau.
On Tuesday, the High Court Judge of Kota Kinabalu Datuk, Ian Chin, had dismissed
the application by the two foreign casinos to register the judgment obtained
in the English High Court pursuant to the Reciprocal Enforcement of Judgment
Act, 1958,
in the High Court in Sabah and Sarawak
Chin said that the dismissal of the bid to register the English High Courts
judgment was “because gambling is against the country’s public policy, which
is belief in God and good social behavior embedded in the Rukunegara.”
“Gambling is clearly against the Rukun Negara. Anything that seeks to go against
the Rukun Negara must surely be regarded as against public policy,” he stated.
In response to the argument that gambling debts incurred in Malaysia would
suffer the same fate in another country if he did not allow the registration
of the foreign judgment, Chin said: “My brief answer to this would be that
the world would be so much better for it and it would make for a better public
policy.”
“Imagine how nice a place the world would be if no country would allow the
recovery of a judgment for a gambling debt which was the result, invariably,
of the debtor being enticed to gamble on credit and beyond his means,” he said.
“I think a law should be passed that allows a gambler to sue a casino for having
enticed him to gamble beyond his means, if that is not already a common law.”
