Chief Judge of Malaya Zabidin Diah held that the leave applications filed by DBKL and developer Pavilion Integrity Sdn Bhd did not fulfil the legal requirements under Section 96 of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964.
The other judges who sat with Zabidin were Justices Nallini Pathmanathan and Zabariah Mohd Yusof.
Besides DBKL and the developer, the then federal territories minister, who also filed a similar application, saw his own application for leave rejected.
The court ordered DBKL and Pavilion Integrity to each pay costs of RM90,000 to the owners and residents, who were respondents in the application, while the federal territories minister and the government were each told to pay RM20,000 in costs to the owners and the residents.
In October last year, a group of 202 owners and residents of two apartment complexes in Taman Maluri successfully got the Court of Appeal to quash DBKL’s decision to allow Pavilion Integrity to build another apartment complex in the vicinity.
The appeals court also 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.
In the court’s judgment, Justice Lee Swee Seng 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,” Lee had said.
DBKL had on March 14, 2018 issued an order in favour of Pavilion Integrity 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.
The house buyers and residents of the two apartment complexes nearby then took out judicial review proceedings to quash DBKL’s decision allowing the new development.
The judicial review application was originally dismissed by the High Court in 2021, and their legal bid only succeeded last year.
They were represented by lawyers Ambiga Sreenevasan, Yeoh Cho Kheong, Ho Kok Yew, Latheefa Koya and Shahid Adli Kamarudin.
Lawyer Cyrus Das appeared for DBKL, while Malik Imtiaz Sarwar acted for Pavilion Integrity.
Senior federal counsel Liew Horng Bin and Nik Noor Nik Kar represented the Federal Territories minister.