Arpah bte Sabar and others v Colex Environmental Pte Ltd

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Judge: Chan Seng Onn J
• Judgment Date: 29 May 2019
• Neutral Citation: [2019] SGHC 137
• Court: High Court (Singapore)
• Docket Number: Tribunal Appeal No 20 of 2018
• Year: 2019
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Hearing Date: 09 May 2019
• Plaintiff Counsel: Tan Sia Khoon Kelvin David and Sara Ng Qian Hui (Vicki Heng Law Corporation)
• Defendant Counsel: Appoo Ramesh (Just Law LLC)
• Subject Matter: Employment Law,Work Injury Compensation Act,Substantial question of law,Employer's liability for compensation,Accident arising out of employment
• Citation: [2019] SGHC 137

Chan Seng Onn J: Introduction

What was expected to be an ordinary day at work for 62 year-old Abu Samad bin Omar (“the Deceased”) took an unfortunate turn when he succumbed to his ischaemic heart disease at his workplace.¹

The Assistant Commissioner decided that the Deceased’s death was caused by his own medical condition and did not arise out of his employment. Accordingly, the Deceased’s next-of-kin (“the claimants”) were not entitled to a payout by Colex Environmental Pte Ltd (“the employer”) and NTUC Income Insurance Co-operative Limited (“the insurer”), the employer’s insurer.² They filed the present appeal against the Assistant Commissioner’s decision.

Facts

On the fateful morning of 19 July 2017, the Deceased reported to work at about 7.30am. At about 8.00am, he had breakfast with three other colleagues, Shamsudin bin Sumri (“Shamsudin”),³ Marof bin Atan (“Marof”) and Munusamy A/L Perumalu⁴ (“Munusamy”).⁵ The mood was jovial, as the parties were discussing the upcoming Hari Raya celebrations, and were joking and laughing with one another.⁶

After breakfast, at about 9.00am, Shamsudin, Marof and Munusamy (collectively, “the trio”) went to a shed where four green refuse bins were located. Shamsudin upturned all four bins so that their wheels were facing skywards. After upturning the bins, the trio’s task was to remove their wheels by using implements to unscrew and dislodge the wheels from the bins.⁷

Each of the three of them attended to one bin each, leaving one bin (“the fourth bin”) unattended.⁸

At about 9.30am, the Deceased, who was employed as a driver,⁹ arrived at the shed and offered his assistance,¹⁰ as he sometimes did.¹¹ Nobody had asked the Deceased to remove the wheels.¹² According to the trio, the Deceased helped to unscrew the screws on the fourth bin.¹³ While helping, he was also laughing and joking with the trio,¹⁴ who had their backs turned against him.¹⁵

Suddenly, the Deceased stopped talking.¹⁶ When Shamsudin and Munusamy turned around, they saw the Deceased collapsing, and they supported him and put him on the ground.¹⁷ Shamsudin and Marof then went to the office to report the incident, and an ambulance was called.¹⁸

The Deceased was sent to Ng Teng Fong General Hospital, where he was subsequently pronounced dead. The cause of his death was ischaemic heart disease.¹⁹ According to the report of Dr Audrey Yeo, prepared on 24 August 2017, shortly after the Deceased’s death, the Deceased’s “[i]schaemic heart disease can give rise to heart failure or potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmias, the latter manifesting as sudden unexpected death, be it at rest, or with physical exertion. Accordingly, it would not be possible to predict if any specific activity at work contributed to his death.”²⁰

On 12 October 2017, the Ministry of Manpower issued a Notice of Assessment of Compensation, stating that the employer was to pay $181,421.73²¹ (“the assessed sum”) as compensation to the Deceased’s surviving next-of-kin, who are the claimants in the present suit.

On 26 October 2017, the employer’s insurer submitted its objection to the Notice of Assessment as it was of the “view that [the Deceased’s] death was due to his own medical condition and not caused by or aggravated arisen [sic] out of and in the course of his employment.”²²

A hearing was thus arranged before the Assistant Commissioner.

The Assistant Commissioner’s decision

An employee’s entitlement to compensation for workplace injury is founded on s 3(1) of the Work Injury Compensation Act (Cap 354, 2009 Rev Ed) (“WICA”), which provides:

Employer’s liability for compensation

3.—(1) If in any employment personal injury by accident arising out of and in the course of the employment is caused to an employee, his employer shall be liable to pay compensation in accordance with the provisions of this Act. [emphasis added]

The key dispute before the Assistant Commissioner was whether the Deceased’s injury had arisen “out of and in the course of his employment”.

In this regard, the Assistant Commissioner found that “[t]here is no evidence of exertion by the Deceased” as “[n]o one had seen the Deceased removing any screws or any wheels.”²³ Further, he found that there was an “absence of a triggering event connected to the Deceased’s employment”.²⁴ This was on the basis that “the so-called “work” that the Deceased was going to perform at the place of employment had not yet commenced”,²⁵ and that the Deceased’s “heart condition was in a very bad condition before his demise”.²⁶ Accordingly, he dismissed the claimants’ claim as they had “failed to establish the causal link between the heart attack and the Deceased’s employment.”²⁷

The claimants appealed against the Assistant Commissioner’s decision.

Preliminary issue: substantial questions of law raised

Before considering the substantive issues proper, the preliminary issue is whether there is a substantial question of law raised in the present case. In this respect, s 29(2A) WICA stipulates that

No appeal shall lie against any order [of the Commissioner] unless a substantial question of law is involved in the appeal and the amount in dispute is not less than $1,000. [emphasis added]

Hence, an appeal against the Assistant Commissioner’s decision must be based on “a substantial question of law” and the amount in dispute must not be less than $1,000. The latter requirement is not disputed in this case, as the assessed amount payable to the claimants far exceeds $1,000 (see [9] above).

As for the substantial question of law, the courts have described the following as constituting errors of law (Karuppiah Ravichandran v GDS Engineering Pte Ltd [2009] 3 SLR(R) 1028 (“Karuppiah”) at [13], also cited in Pang Chew Kim v Wartsila Singapore Pte Ltd [2012] 1 SLR 15 (“Pang Chew Kim”) at [20]):

Errors of law include misinterpretation of a statute or any other legal document or a rule of common law; asking oneself and answering the wrong question, taking irrelevant considerations into account or failing to take relevant considerations into account when purporting to apply the law to the facts; admitting inadmissible evidence or rejecting admissible and relevant evidence; exercising a discretion on the basis of incorrect legal principles; giving reasons which disclose faulty legal reasoning or which are inadequate to fulfil an express duty to give reasons, and misdirecting oneself as to the burden of proof. [emphasis added]

In addition, “a factual finding which was such that ‘no person acting judicially and properly instructed as to the relevant law could have come to the determination upon appeal’ amount[s] to a misconception or error in point of law” (Pang Chew Kim at [20]). These must be “findings that no person would have come to if he had applied the law properly. It does not mean that every manifestly wrong finding of fact amounts to an error of law” (Karuppiah at [16]).

For example, in Next of kin of Ramu Vanniyar Ravichandran v Fongsoon Enterprises (Pte) Ltd [2008] 3 SLR(R) 105 (“Ramu Vanniyar”), Choo Han Teck J found that errors in finding of fact that stemmed from errors of law had been made by the Commissioner. Accordingly, Choo J held that there were substantial questions of law that had been raised, and allowed the appeal.

In Ramu Vanniyar, the deceased workman had been engaged on a part-time basis by Meera, the foreman of the respondent company. The key issue was whether the deceased was in the employment of the respondent company. This issue turned on whether Meera had authority to engage the services of the deceased.

The Commissioner held that Meera had no such authority, and that the deceased was therefore never in the respondent’s employment. Further, even if the deceased was an employee of the respondent, his death did not arise “out of and in the course” of that employment as he had gone on a frolic of his own in using the forklift which he was not authorised to handle. The Commissioner thus concluded that the respondent was not liable to pay compensation to the claimants.

On appeal, Choo J held that questions of law had been raised as the Commissioner had erroneously applied agency principles and failed to consider the presumption in s 3(4) WICA. The Commissioner’s misapplication of the law led to the erroneous findings of fact that Meera had no authority to engage the deceased, and caused him to fail to find, pursuant to the unrebutted s 3(4) WICA presumption, that the accident had arisen in the course of the deceased’s employment. Accordingly, the appeal was allowed.

The decision of Ramu Vanniyar thus demonstrates that errors of fact may constitute errors of law if they flow from errors of law in the first place.

In this case, for reasons to be elaborated on at [43] to [45], the Assistant Commissioner had similarly failed to apply the presumption in s 3(6) WICA correctly, with the result that he wrongly placed the burden of proof on the claimants rather than the employer.

Additionally, the Assistant Commissioner’s observation that there was “a clear absence of uncontroverted evidence that the deceased was working before he collapsed”²⁸ [emphasis added] was directly contradicted by the evidence proffered by the trio. In fact, as will be explained at [49] to [55] below, it appears that the Assistant Commissioner had completely ignored the trio’s evidence to the contrary (ie, that they had seen the Deceased working before he collapsed). This amounts to a failure to take into account relevant considerations as well as a disregard of admissible and relevant evidence: namely, the evidence of the trio as to whether the Deceased had been working prior to his collapse.

Given that the Assistant Commissioner’s erroneous application of the s 3(6) WICA presumption and his failure to take into account the relevant evidence of the trio directly led to his complete denial of the claimants’...