PETALING JAYA: Lawyer Alan Gomez has been given permission to appear in the Kota Kinabalu High Court to represent former attorney-general (AG) Tommy Thomas in a suit over the ex-AG’s alleged mismanagement of a claim by the descendants of the Sulu sultanate.
Counsel Raymond Szetu said Justice Christopher Chin granted ad hoc admission to Gomez, a partner in the legal firm of Tommy Thomas, Advocates and Solicitors, in Kuala Lumpur.
“The judge allowed Gomez’s admission despite strenuous objections from the Sabah Attorney-General and the Sabah Law Society,” Szetu told FMT after today’s ruling.
Last year, Thomas appointed Sabah law firm Szetu & Co as solicitors to handle the brief as lawyers from the peninsula require ad-hoc admission from the High Court of Sabah and Sarawak to appear in cases there.
Szetu then filed an application in the Kota Kinabalu High Court to get Gomez admitted.
The suit was brought by two Sabah deputy chief ministers, Jeffrey Kitingan and Joachim Gunsalam, state ministers Jahid Jahim and Ellron Angin, as well as state assistant ministers Joniston Bangkuai, Abidin Madingkir, Robert Tawfik, Julita Mojungki and Flovia Ng.
Thomas has filed an application to strike out the suit.
The date for the striking out application has yet to be fixed.
The nine plaintiffs, who filed the suit last August, want a declaration that Thomas, who as AG was the government’s legal adviser between June 2018 and February 2020, committed misfeasance in public office.
They said the Sulu descendants had served a preliminary notice of intention to begin arbitration in November 2017 but Thomas failed to respond and later made a decision not to take part or intervene in the arbitration proceeding to challenge Gonzalo Stampa’s jurisdiction.
In February last year, Stampa ruled that the federal government must pay US$14.92 billion (RM62.59 billion) to the descendants of the last sultan of Sulu.
Early this month, a Spanish constitutional court upheld a lower court order which annulled Stampa’s appointment of arbitrator to preside over the dispute.
The dispute has its origin in an 1878 Deed of Cession between the then sultan of Sulu, Sultan Jamal Al Alam, and Baron de Overbeck, the then maharaja of Sabah, and British North Borneo Company’s Alfred Dent.
Pursuant to the agreement, Jamal ceded sovereignty over large parts of Sabah to Dent and Overbeck, who agreed that they and their future heirs would pay the heirs of the sultan 5,000 Mexican dollars annually.
In 1936, the last formally recognised sultan of Sulu, Jamalul Kiram II, died without heirs, and payments temporarily ceased until North Borneo High Court chief justice Charles F Macaskie named nine court-appointed heirs in 1939.
Although Malaysia took over these payments when it became the successor of the agreement following Sabah’s independence and the formation of the federation in 1963, the payments – equivalent to RM5,300 a year – ceased in 2013 after an incursion by armed men into Lahad Datu, along the eastern coast of Sabah.
