About the project

The Singapore Academy of Law’s Law Reform Committee considered whether litigation funding should be allowed in cases of formal corporate insolvency such as in judicial management and liquidation proceedings, as well as approved schemes of arrangement under section 210 of the Companies Act (Chapter 50, 2006 Revised Edition).

The Committee recommended that funding for judicial managers and liquidators should be allowed within a regulated framework that strikes a balance between the competing policies of access to justice and purity of justice in Singapore, but that it would be premature to extend funding to schemes of arrangement.

Project status: Completed

• The report was published in February 2014.
• Parliament amended the Civil Law Act (Chapter 43, 1999 Revised Edition) by passing the Civil Law (Amendment) Act 2017 (No 2 of 2017) on 10 January 2017. The amendment Act, which came into force on 1 March 2017, introduced sections 5A and 5B into the Civil Law Act which abolished the common law torts of maintenance and champerty, and made it lawful for a person to provide funding for the costs of prescribed dispute resolution proceedings. By the Civil Law (Third-Party Funding) Regulations 2017 (S 68/2017), the Minister for Law declared that litigation funding would only be allowed in respect of international arbitration proceedings and court proceedings connected thereto. Thus, the Committee’s recommendations have not yet been adopted to their full extent.
• The report was cited by the High Court in Re Fan Kow Hin [2018] SGHC 257, [2019] 3 Singapore Law Reports [SLR] 861 at paragraphs 28 and 29.

Areas of law

◾ Civil procedure
◾ Insolvency law

Click on the image above to view the report

Last updated 27 May 2019