Lawyer Sitpah Selvaratnam, who is leading the legal team for the four plaintiffs, told reporters that the application was heard this morning before High Court judicial commissioner Khajidah Idris.

“The hearing will continue tomorrow at 3pm,” she said.

Besides 1MDB and the government, the other two plaintiffs are MDB Energy Holdings Limited and 1MDB Global Investment Limited, which are 1MDB subsidiaries.

On Oct 5, the same court had granted an application by the four plaintiffs to appoint a central broker and an international appraiser to handle the sale of the Equanimity, which purportedly belongs to fugitive businessman Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low.

It followed a decision on Aug 24 by the same court in granting an application by the four plaintiffs to sell the Equanimity.

In the application filed on Aug 23, the four plaintiffs named the owner of the ship, Equanimity, of Cayman Islands, as the defendant in the suit filed through the law firm of Jeremy Joseph & Partners.

In the notice of application, the four plaintiffs asked for the sale of the ship, bunkers, fuel, lubricants and other consumables on board to be conducted via public tender or private treaty by the Admiralty Court’s sheriff.

The plaintiffs wanted the sheriff to receive bids or offers for the vessel and the bunkers and for the purchase price to be paid to the sheriff in US dollars or euros or ringgit.

They said the proceeds of the sale of the vessel should be paid into court and placed in a bank account in Malaysia as approved by the accountant-general.

The superyacht was brought to Port Klang on Aug 7 after the Indonesian authorities handed it over to Malaysia.

It was seized off Bali in February at the request of the US authorities as part of the corruption investigation launched by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) into 1MDB.