The profile of supplementary agreement law cases

Abstract

A contract creates a legal obligation upon the contracting parties. Generally, when parties enter into a contract, they are not locked up into its terms forever. If certain requirements are not met, change of contract can become a source of contention particularly if the parties contest the sufficiency of the change and their respective rights and obligations under the contract. However, it becomes norm in Malaysia to have Supplementary Agreement (SA) after execution of main contract. This can be seen trough Malayan Law Journal where more than 200 cases of SA appeared from the year of 1915 to 2012. For this study, the profile of SA case law is developed to determine the most common reasons for the use of SA and the legal issues arose that made the case been referred to the Court. The criteria of profiling are types of contract, types of Court, number of SA appeared, the parties involved, reason for SA and the issues arose. The cases are based on the Malaysian cases from the year of 1990 to 2011. From the analysis, the most reason for the use of SA is identified which is due to new issues that arise after the execution of main contracts, followed by the inadequacy of main contract and complexity of main contract. While for the legal issues, the issue arose are in terms the of validity of SA’s and implementation of SA. For the cases that has no issues or dispute regarding SA, the Court did not prompt any question of existence of SA and accept it as a legal document. Hopefully, by make this profiling, it will help people who are potentially involved in contract in future to prevent and minimize the dispute among parties.