The Court of Appeal had ruled in October in favour of 202 owners and residents of two apartment complexes in the vicinity by setting aside DBKL’s decision to allow Pavilion Integrity Sdn Bhd to develop a 45-storey serviced apartment block in the area.
Instead, it directed DBKL to acquire the land allocated for the new apartment complex – known as Lot 810 – and use it to construct a 20m-long road to ease the traffic woes of the residents.
Lot 810 had previously been designated for road construction under the KL City Plan 2020.
Both DBKL and the developer had filed their leave applications in November, within the timeframe stipulated under the Rules of the Federal Court 1995.
Under the rules, an application for leave must be filed within 30 days of the decision of the Court of Appeal.
The leave application is a filter process to determine whether there is sufficient reason to warrant the Federal Court sitting to hear an appeal.
The test normally used by the apex court is to determine whether there is a question to be decided for the first time or one of importance for which a decision of the Federal Court would be to public advantage.
The court set case management for Dec 5.
The federal territories minister, who was also a party in the proceedings before the lower court, has also filed an application for leave to appeal the decision.
In its judgment, the Court of Appeal noted that DBKL had “flip-flopped” on its decisions relating to Lot 810.
“(The decisions were) made willy-nilly with no proper and credible reports to explain the deviation from what had been disclosed in the city plan,” said Justice Lee Swee Seng, when delivering the court’s decision.
DBKL had on March 14, 2018 issued an order in favour of Pavilion which allowed it to develop the proposed serviced apartment block on Lot 810.
It also approved a new traffic flow system for the Taman Maluri area.
However, on Dec 7 of the same year, DBKL retracted the development order and said it was sticking to the proposal contained in the city plan for the 20m road.
House buyers and residents of the two apartment complexes nearby then took out judicial review proceedings to quash DBKL’s decisions allowing the new development.
The judicial review application was originally dismissed by the High Court in 2021.