KUALA LUMPUR, 23 July 2009: The Kuala Lumpur Commercial Court will be established by year-end as part of the country’s commitment to address business-related issues in an expeditious manner.
It would also speed up the resolution of commercial disputes, said Deputy International Trade and Industry Minister Datuk Jacob Dungau Sagan at the ministry’s annual dialogue with foreign-based associations here today.
He said the setting up of the commercial court was part of efforts by the Special Taskforce to Facilitate Business (Pemudah).
“Pemudah is currently implementing many new measures including the implementation of MyCoID – a standardised identification number to be adopted for companies dealing with all government agencies,” he said.
It is understood that Pemudah is also preparing a guidebook on industrial relations and compiling an asset search directory that can assist in identifying and tracing company assets.
Jacob said Malaysia would continue to focus on trade liberalisation initiatives including through regional and bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) to complement a multilateral approach.
“Malaysia is currently pursuing and negotiating bilateral FTAs with trading partners such as the US, Chile and Australia and the regional Asean-EU FTA,” he said.
Presently, Malaysia has bilateral FTAs with Japan, Pakistan and New Zealand, and is a party to five regional FTAs namely, Asean-China, Asean-Korea, Asean-Japan, Asean-Australia-New Zealand and Asean-India.
Citing the latest IMF World Economic Outlook, Jacob said the global economy was beginning to pull out of recession. Although recovery was expected to be sluggish, the rate of decline in economic activity was moderating, he added.
He said Malaysia’s exports had also shown an increasing trend since the beginning of the year from RM38 billion in January to RM43 billion in May, boosted by the RM67 billion stimulus packages, liberalisation of 27 service sub-sectors and substantial changes to the Foreign Investment Committee guidelines.
A similar pattern was observed in manufacturing activities where the index went on an uptrend from minus 23.4% in January to minus 15.2% in May, he said.
“For Miti, its allocation of RM792.4 million is currently being spent to implement a series of capacity building and industry strengthening measures in areas including services, automotive, skills training and high-impact projects,” he added. — Bernama
Nora says
But first should you not clean up your judiciary? I’ve had discussions a couple of times with business associates and they remarked [that] they [would] rather bring their commercial disputes to Singapore’s courts [than] Malaysia’s.