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ASEAN Beat | Politics | Southeast Asia
Courtroom bailiffs in Luxembourg have once more issued seizure orders for 2 native models of the Malaysian state oil agency, as a part of a contentious $15 billion arbitration dispute.
Courtroom bailiffs in Luxembourg this week issued contemporary seizure orders for 2 models of the Malaysian state oil agency Petronas – the most recent twist in a posh authorized case that descendants of a defunct sultanate have mounted in opposition to Malaysia over a colonial-era land settlement.
The information was damaged by Reuters, which cited the heirs’ lawyer and courtroom paperwork. It additionally confirmed with Petronas the brand new seizure order for the corporate’s Luxembourg-based Petronas Azerbaijan and Petronas South Caucasus models.
In February of final yr, a French arbitration courtroom ordered Malaysia to pay $14.9 billion to the authorized descendants of Jamalul Kiram II, the final Sultan of Sulu. The settlement is expounded to a deal that the Sultan of Sulu signed in 1878 with a British buying and selling firm over the usage of his territory, in what’s now the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo.
After independence, Malaysia honored the settlement, paying the sultan’s descendants a token annual sum of some thousand {dollars}. But it surely minimize off the funds after greater than 200 armed militants led by one other self-claimed descendant of Jamalul Kiram II invaded the Lahad Datu district, in Sabah, from the southern Philippines.
Kuala Lumpur which unsurprisingly rejects the declare outright as a bogus and opportunistic cash-grab has refused to participate within the arbitration, and has vowed to battle the enforcement of the award. Petronas has taken the same place. When contacted by Reuters this week, the large state agency reiterated its earlier place that the heirs’ actions have been baseless and the corporate will proceed to defend its authorized place. The multi-billion-dollar award can also be seemingly disproportionate given the comparatively paltry annual funds that Malaysia was making previous to 2013.
In June of final yr, Malaysia’s authorities obtained a keep order in opposition to the enforcement of the French courtroom ruling, on the grounds that it would infringe on the nation’s sovereignty. However the heirs’ legal professionals argue regardless of the keep order, the French ruling stays legally enforceable outdoors France – and the authorized crew has tried up their efforts to grab Malaysian authorities property all over the world.
The next month, legal professionals representing the heirs made an preliminary try and seize the 2 Petronas subsidiaries. Final month, Malaysia’s Regulation Minister Azalina Othman Stated introduced that the order had been put aside by a Luxembourg district courtroom, describing it as a “important victory” for Malaysia.
The most recent growth means that the legal professionals representing the Sulu heirs will proceed to press their declare till they exhaust all doable. Reuters quoted Paul Cohen, one of many authorized crew, as saying that first seizure order had been lifted attributable to a technicality.
As I’ve written earlier than, the case is a hanging occasion of the affect that colonialism nonetheless has in trendy Southeast Asia, and a reminder of the relative youth of the area’s nation-states, the permanence of which may simply be taken with no consideration. Additionally it is a case examine within the use, and potential misuse of the colonial legacies.
The legal professionals for the Sulu sultan’s heirs have leaned closely on anti-colonial justifications for the case, framing it as a case of “justice” for these “dispossessed” by Western imperialism, and in search of to play into the rising European consciousness and guilt concerning the continent’s vicious colonial legacy.
But from the Malaysian perspective, it isn’t exhausting to see how issues would possibly look precisely the alternative: how the usage of European courts to breach the sovereignty of a former British colony, and applicable billions of {dollars} of its wealth, represents not a break from this sample of domination however its continuation.
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