Global Courant
KUALA LUMPUR – Lawyers for the Malaysian government are “confident” of winning a Dutch lawsuit over a $14.9 billion (S$20.1 billion) award against the Southeast Asian nation stemming from a 19th-century deal with a Philippine sultan, a senior minister has said.
The complex legal battles being fought in European courts are rooted in Malaysia’s colonial past, with territorial claims and potentially billions of dollars in state assets at stake.
The Malaysian government has warned that legal action being taken by the descendants of the sultan of Sulu “poses a threat to the country’s sovereignty and security”.
But in a Facebook post late Thursday, Azalina Othman Said, a minister in the Malaysian prime minister’s department, said her lawyers were “confident” in victory.
“Malaysian appointed lawyers are confident that Malaysia has a good chance of winning based on the facts and evidence clearly on Malaysia’s side,” she wrote.
The Sultan of Sulu once ruled the tropical islands that make up the southern Philippines and Sabah in Malaysia.
Oil-rich Sabah fell under the control of European colonial powers in 1878 in an agreement in which the sultan and his descendants received annual payments – the equivalent of about US$1,100 – which independent Malaysia continued to make after it was established in 1963.
Kuala Lumpur cut off payments in 2013 after a bloody incursion of the Sulu archipelago into Sabah, where the Philippines has a long-simmering territorial claim.
Eight of the sultan’s heirs have filed a claim for damages for cessation of payment.
A French arbitration court awarded $14.9 billion to Malaysia last year, but a judge later suspended enforcement of the ruling while Kuala Lumpur appealed.
Lawyers for the sultan’s descendants have since petitioned the Court of Appeal in The Hague to allow the Paris decision to be enforced in the Netherlands, arguing that the ruling was international and the suspension only applied to France.
A ruling in the case is expected on Tuesday.
Datuk Seri Azalina said the Malaysian government “remains committed to continued efforts to ensure that Malaysia’s sovereignty is preserved in this case”.
If the court agrees to the heirs’ request, it could pave the way for the freezing of billions of dollars of Malaysian state property in the Netherlands, a spokesman for the plaintiffs said on Friday.
He added that there were more than 160 countries where such a petition could be submitted. AFP
