PT Panosonic Gobel Indonesia v Stratech Systems Ltd

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Judge: Philip Pillai JC
• Judgment Date: 06 May 2010
• Neutral Citation: [2010] SGHC 141
• Plaintiff Counsel: Yong Boon On, Shum Wai Keong and Liu Zeming (Wong & Leow LLC)
• Docket Number: Suit No 34 of 2007 (Registrar’s Appeal No 20 of 2010)
• Date: 06 May 2010
• Hearing Date: 01 March 2010,23 March 2010
• Subject Matter: Contract
• Year: 2010
• Citation: [2010] SGHC 141
• Defendant Counsel: Devinder Rai (Acies Law Corporation)
• Court: High Court (Singapore)
• Published date: 11 May 2010

Philip Pillai JC:

This was an appeal brought by the defendant from the assistant registrar’s (“AR”) decision on 11 January 2010 in which the AR awarded the plaintiff, PT Panasonic Gobel Indonesia, the sum of S$1,830,000 as damages.

The principal ground of appeal was that the plaintiff had failed to prove the loss and damage it has suffered given the nature of the claim and the evidence it adduced. The defendant, Stratech Systems Limited, submitted that in the circumstances, the plaintiff should only have been awarded nominal damages.

In support of this, the defendant, Stratech Systems Limited, first submitted that the plaintiff’s claim for a refund of the entire payments made by them to the defendant was in fact a claim for restitution. The defendant submitted that a claim for restitution could only be made if the plaintiff could show that there was a total failure of consideration.

The principal action between the parties from which the AR’s damages assessment followed was Suit No 34 of 2007, PT Panasonic Goebel Indonesia v Stratech Systems Ltd [2009] 1SLR(R) 470, where Judith Prakash J found at [87] that the plaintiff’s claim was one for damages to be assessed and “not a claim for refund of payments made on the basis of a total failure of consideration.” The learned Judith Prakash J had found at [86] that the plaintiff was entitled “to claim whatever damages it can prove it has sustained by [the defendant’s] breach up to the amount of S$1,830,000 being the total costs of services to be provided by [the defendant] (for all four modules) under the Services Agreement, plus interest”.

Three measures of damages are set out by Andrew Phang in Cheshire, Fifoot and Furmston’s Law of Contract - Second Singapore and Malaysian Edition (Butterworths Asia, 1998) (“Cheshire, Fifoot and Furmston – Second Singapore and Malaysian Edition”) at pp 988 – 989:

The question of what exactly it is that the plaintiff has lost is often a subtle one and for this purpose it is useful to use the terminology popularised by a famous American article and distinguish between expectation loss and reliance loss. Expectation loss is the loss of that which the plaintiff would have received if the contract had been properly performed.

…

There is a third category of damages commonly referred to as restitution loss.

[emphasis in original]

In principle, it seemed that the plaintiff had a free choice whether to quantify his loss on an expectation or a...