Arunachalam Balasubramanian v Lion City Rentals Pte Ltd and another

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Judge: Vince Gui
• Judgment Date: 16 June 2020
• Neutral Citation: [2020] SGMC 33
• Court: Magistrates' Court (Singapore)
• Docket Number: Magistrate Court Suit No 20012 of 2017, Assessment of Damages No. 881 of 2018
• Published date: 04 July 2020
• Year: 2020
• Hearing Date: 16 January 2020,28 February 2020,05 June 2020,08 November 2019,15 May 2020
• Plaintiff Counsel: Riaz Qayyum, Abdul Halim Bin Rosalan, Muhammad Ridwan Bin Abdul Rahim and Tan Kok Siang (Riaz LLC)
• Defendant Counsel: The defendant absent and unrepresented,Mahendra Prasad Rai and Ruthra Ram (Cooma & Rai)
• Subject Matter: Civil Procedure,Judgments and orders,Interlocutory judgments,Effect of interlocutory judgments,Whether defendant can disclaim liability without setting aside interlocutory judgment,Statutory interpretation,Construction of statute,Section 35 of the State Courts Act,Whether the statutory rule operates as a jurisdictional bar,Tort,Negligence,Res ipsa loquitur,Whether doctrine applicable where cause of accident is clear,Vicarious liability,Whether car rental company vicariously liable for hirer's negligence
• Citation: [2020] SGMC 33

Deputy Registrar Vince Gui: Introduction

The Plaintiff in this action is claiming for damages suffered from a motor accident against the Defendant, a car rental company. Default interlocutory judgment was entered following the Defendant’s failure to enter an appearance in the action. Before the action proceeded for assessment of damages, the Defendant’s insurers, Ergo Insurance Pte Ltd (the “Insurer”), intervened on the basis that it may fall upon the Insurer to satisfy the final judgment made against the Defendant, pursuant to section 9 of the Motor Vehicles (Third Party Risks and Compensation) Act (Cap. 189, 2000 Rev Ed) (“MVA”). At the assessment of damages hearing before me, the Defendant once again failed to appear.

Like many uncontested motor accident claims, this action would likely have achieved a straightforward resolution, but for two peculiarities in the Plaintiff’s litigation strategy. First, the Plaintiff previously brought another action against the Defendant premised on what was essentially the same cause of action. Second, the Plaintiff, in its pleadings, alleged that the hirer of the vehicle was responsible for the accident. Pertinently, the Plaintiff’s pleaded case did not allege that the Defendant was negligent. Capitalising on these two peculiarities, the Insurer disavowed liability on behalf of the Defendant on two grounds. First, the present action violates section 35 of the State Courts Act (Cap 321, 2007 Rev Ed), a statute that prohibits claimants from dividing a single cause of action into two or more actions. Second, the Plaintiff’s pleadings do not disclose any actionable claim against the Defendant.

Both arguments, particularly the second, sparked a heated debate in written submissions that engaged rather novel issues of law, which I will turn to later. When I heard the arguments, the first question that crossed my mind was whether it is more appropriate to raise these arguments in an application to set aside the default interlocutory judgment. In this regard, it was undisputed that the Insurer has the standing to set aside a default interlocutory judgment (see Vineshwaran s/o Sambath v Chandrashegaran s/o Rajagopal & Anor [2016] SGDC 114 at [19]). In this case, the Insurer decided against setting aside the default interlocutory judgment. In its view, there is no legal impediment in raising these arguments at the assessment of damages hearing. Unsurprisingly, this prompted the Plaintiff to argue that the arguments raised by the Insurer go towards issues of liability which have already been determined in the default interlocutory judgment, and since the Insurer has foregone the opportunity to set aside the judgment, it is precluded from re-litigating issues of liability in the assessment of damages hearing.

Against this backdrop of events, three main issues arose for consideration: Whether present action violates section 35 of the State Courts Act, and if so, whether that violation renders the present action a nullity. If the action is not rendered a nullity, whether it is open to the Insurer to disclaim liability at the assessment of damages hearing without setting aside the interlocutory judgment. If it remains open to the Insurer to disclaim liability, whether the Statement of Claim discloses a reasonable cause of action.

In this judgment, I deliver my decision on these issues.

On a preliminary note, it is undisputed that the Insurer is entitled to raise all defences that are available to the Defendant and would have a bearing on the Insurer’s interests. The analysis hereunder will therefore proceed on this basis.

Does s 35 of the State Courts Act render the present action a nullity?

It is common ground that the Plaintiff had in MC/MC 8877/2017 (“the First Action”) brought a claim against the same Defendant on the same cause of action. In this regard, the material facts supporting both the First Action and the present action are essentially the same. They both arose from a motor accident that took place on 19 September 2016 between the Plaintiff, who was a riding a motorcycle, and the Defendant, who was the owner of the motor car, which was at all material times driven by its hirer.

The First Action was commenced on 26 May 2017. It was discontinued on 24 November 2017. Later on the same day, the Plaintiff filed the present action.

I preface my analysis by reproducing section 35 of the State Courts Act:

A cause of action shall not be divided for the purposes of bringing 2 or more actions.

On its plain meaning, the statutory rule clearly prohibits the Plaintiff from filing of the present action. There is no dispute that the same cause of action undergirds the First Action and the present action. In this regard, it is trite that a “cause of action” essentially refers to the essential factual material that supports a claim (Multistar Holdings Ltd v Geocon Piling & Engineering Pte Ltd [2016] 2 SLR 1 at [34]), and both actions arose from the same negligent act and the same collision. By filing the present action, the Plaintiff has “divided” the cause of action into “two or more actions”, in violation of the statutory prohibition.

The purposive interpretation affirms the ordinary meaning of the statute. The High Court has held that the statutory rule manifests the public interest in protecting litigants from being vexed more than once by what is essentially the same claim (Ng Kong Choon v Tang Wee Goh [2016] 3 SLR 935 (“Ng Kong Choon”) at [64] citing Buckland v Palmer [1984] 1 WLR 1109). By filing two separate actions for the same claim and serving them both on the Defendant, the Plaintiff had vexed the Defendant more than once, thereby violating the interest that the statute was enacted to protect.

The Plaintiff contends that the concern of multiplicity of proceedings does not arise given that the Plaintiff had discontinued the First Action before commencing the present action.¹ In my judgment, this argument is misguided. It is plain from the provision that the filing of a separate action is enough to invoke the rule, so long as the separate action traverses the same facts. Nothing in the provision requires the first action to be pending. If Parliament had meant to confine the rule to operate against concurrent actions only, one would expect the following words in italics to appear in the provision:

A cause of action shall not be divided for the purposes of bringing and maintaining 2 or more actions concurrently.

Indeed, the Court in Ng Kong Choon had considered and rejected the same argument raised by the Plaintiff. There, the claimant argued that the rule applies only when there are proceedings in existence and that the claimant did not fall afoul of the rule since parties had settled and discontinued the prior action. Rejecting this argument and affirming the lower court’s decision to strike out the separate action, Justice Belinda Ang held that the claimant’s interpretation would entail reading the word “bringing” to mean “bringing and maintaining”, which is not how the provision is worded (at [79]-[80]): 79 … [The claimant’s] interpretation would involve reading the word “bringing” in s 35 as meaning “bringing and maintaining”. As highlighted by [the defendant] before the District Judge, the word “maintaining” is nowhere to be found in the provision. 80 In my view, there is nothing in the statutory language (express or implied) that supports [the claimant’s] interpretation of s 35. I agree with the District Judge that there is no statutory exception suffixed to s 35 stating, for example, that the provision does not apply when there was no other pending action. …

In my view, the Plaintiff’s position is also untenable from a policy standpoint, as it would have the effect of undermining the legislative objective of preventing claimants from unnecessarily vexing defendants with repeated actions. Taking the Plaintiff’s argument to its logical conclusion, it would mean that claimants can file multiple suits against the same defendant in quick succession, so long as they discontinue one suit before they file the next. I have no doubt that defendants confronted with such successive lawsuits would be unduly vexed, perhaps no less than one who is defending concurrent lawsuits. This would stymie the object of the statute and allow the targeted mischief to fester.

It is unclear why the Plaintiff chose to discontinue the First Action. Given the differences in the wording of the Statement of Claim filed in the present action, it would appear that the Plaintiff had wanted to amend its pleadings. If that were the case, it could and should have simply amended the pleadings and continued with the First Action. The fact of the matter is that it did not do so, and instead launched another action against the same Defendant, thereby contravening the statutory prohibition. While I observed from the case file of the First Action that the Defendant had yet to take any steps in the First Action before its discontinuation, this does not feature as a relevant consideration in the analytical framework. Section 35 operates as a bright-line rule. It does not provide the Court with the discretion to consider the egregiousness of the breach and the power to tailor the sanction on a case-by-case basis. In this regard, the Court in Ng Kong Choon similarly took the view that the provision leaves no room for the Court to “exercise its discretion” (at [83]). In these premises, I am unable to engage in a balancing exercise and weigh the scales of prejudice. In any event, the Plaintiff led no evidence and made no submissions on the prejudice (or the lack thereof) suffered by the Defendant. Thus, while I appreciate that the rule carries draconian consequences for what may have been a minor transgression, the law and the evidence constraints me from making an exception for the Plaintiff.

Ordinarily, a defendant seeking to invoke s 35...