The heirs of a sultanate are using international law to make Malaysia pay

Think about that a group of litigants took the US federal government to courtroom in Russia, and won a ruling that they have been owed billions of dollars around an settlement signed in the early 19th century – on the grounds that Alaska belonged to Russia ahead of 1867. Similarly, what if the Greek government ended up established by courts in Turkey to owe a big sum of income over an historic agreement, the argument currently being that, because Greece was then in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey would be the ideal area to deal with this challenge? Both of those circumstances are unthinkable, and the latter could bring the flamable Greco-Turkish relations to the brink.

Some thing incredibly identical to this, though, has just transpired to Malaysia. Very last 7 days, it led to a bailiff serving asset seizure notices at the Luxembourg offices of two subsidiaries of Petronas, Malaysia’s point out-owned electrical power huge, and sent panic by means of the govt that countrywide assets everywhere in the globe could be at chance.

The asset seizure notices had been shipped as the end result of a ruling that Malaysia owes $14.9 billion to a group who assert to be the heirs of a sultanate that has not existed considering the fact that 1915, and is an unwelcome instance of how the global authorized method can nonetheless be entangled by almost-forgotten relics of colonial historical past.

The story begins in 1878, when the then sultan of Sulu, a group of islands in western Philippines, signed an arrangement that allowed the British North Borneo Business to choose more than a chunk of land in what is now the Malaysian state of Sabah. Any dispute about whether or not it was a lease or a cession really should have been cleared up by a subsequent treaty in 1903 that confirmed the “cession”. North Borneo later became a British colony, and in 1963 agreed to become part of the newly created point out of Malaysia.

Up until eventually 9 many years back, Malaysia continued spending an annual cession payment of 5,300 ringgit ($1,190) to descendants of the very last sultan, who died in 1936. But in 2013, a 235-robust group linked with one of the pretenders to the defunct sultanate “invaded” Sabah – which sounds like a joke, besides 56 of the militants died, as did 10 Malaysian stability power personnel and 6 civilians.

The sum of cash that could reasonably be claimed, hence – if it was not considered reasonably forfeited immediately after the attack on Malaysia – may possibly be all-around $13,500, with desire. Barely a sultan’s ransom. The heirs and their lawyers, however, have openly taken this as an opportunity to demand from customers compensation for the wide mineral wealth in Sabah that no person was aware of back in 1878.

Tommy Thomas, who was Malaysia’s attorney common when the case was proceeding, not long ago claimed that the heirs instructed the Malaysian govt “that they attempted to go to the UK” as the previous colonial energy in North Borneo. “The Uk chased them away. The United kingdom claimed: ‘We have absolutely nothing to do with this, go to the courts of Malaysia’”.

The heirs then went to Spain, the previous colonial rulers of the Philippines, exactly where the Madrid Large Courtroom appointed an arbitrator, Gonzalo Stampa. In accordance to Mr Thomas, Malaysia contacted the Spanish authorities, and “the Madrid courtroom agreed with us and established apart everything” – whereupon Mr Stampa took the case to France, which likes to simply call itself “the house of global arbitration”. In February, the massive sum was awarded, a judgment the French Court of Attraction requested stayed on July 12 – besides by then, the bailiffs had already sprung into action in Luxembourg.

The story is even more convoluted than that, and if it looks strange that the scenario moved to France, the rationalization offered by a person involved supply to a Malaysian paper, The Edge, was that an “arbitration is like a aircraft – when it takes off, there is no way the handle tower wherever the plane took off can dictate what happens”.

The Malaysian authorities is confident that it is in the appropriate. Potentially a rather small sum could be because of to the heirs, but almost nothing remotely near to $14.9bn. And that is currently being generous, simply because lots of historians dispute that the Sulu sultanate ever had any legitimate assert to the land in Sabah in the initially place in point, they argue, it belonged to Brunei.

“Sulu never ever had a treaty or a title deed from Brunei, and no file or proof exists of Sulu ever possessing or governing North Borneo,” suggests Bunn Nagara, convener of the Sabah Malaysia Research Team. Brunei ceded the location to the British North Borneo Firm in 1877. “Sulu was asserting a declare to the territory and experienced a status for raiding coastal settlements, so as an insurance plan plan the enterprise made a different cession settlement with Sulu.”

In brief, the heirs had been fortunate to acquire cession payments for a land that might never ever have been theirs to begin with for so extensive. Until eventually not too long ago, all this was mostly a make a difference for historians, although as Mr Bunn details out, “the claim continues to be a quite populist problem in the Philippines, unsupported by the details as it is. Prior presidents these kinds of as Corazon Aquino and Gloria Arroyo, who tried to mitigate Manila’s declare on Sabah, have been accused by some as traitors”.

Now, nonetheless, although the Malaysian government advised the Fiscal Occasions that the award’s suspension in Paris was grounds for other countries to refuse its enforcement, the heirs’ legal professionals in London insisted that “the seizure course of action is a rolling programme”.

Malaysian officers are taking steps to secure assets overseas, but the fret at the minute is that the heirs’ attorneys, who are thought to be backed by a main litigation fund in London, “can decide on from the other 167 jurisdictions that are bash to the New York Convention on arbitration, and then Malaysia will have to display up and say we have a continue to be from the Paris Court docket of Attractiveness”, claims 1 involved in how to fight this motion in Kuala Lumpur. “What’s the limit to this? Ought to European nations have any job in these sorts of disputes? Should not colonialism have finished presently?”

All great factors. What this bizarre story exhibits, nevertheless, is that when colonialism could be long gone, its legacy can continue to be exploited. International law requirements to capture up. Regular Malaysians do not are worthy of this attempt to squeeze billions out of them. And by some means, I suspect that deep sympathy for the descendants of the past Sultan of Sulu does not best their lawyers’ checklist of concerns.

Revealed: July 20, 2022, 4:00 AM