Re Fong Thin Choo

Re Fong Thin Choo
The Old Supreme Court Building, photographed in April 2007
Court	High Court of Singapore
Full case name	Re Fong Thin Choo
Decided	29 April 1991
Citation(s)	[1991] 1 S.L.R.(R.) 774
Court membership
Judge sitting	Chan Sek Keong J.
Case opinions
Order of prohibition issued against the Director-General of Customs and Excise to prevent him from collecting customs duty from a company for allegedly not exporting goods as he had insufficiently inquired into the facts and had thus made his decision on an incorrect basis of fact.

Re Fong Thin Choo is an administrative law case decided in 1991 by the High Court of Singapore concerning the legality of a demand by the Director-General of Customs and Excise ("DG") that the applicant's company pay S$130,241.30 in customs duty as it had not exported certain goods. The case was presided over by Justice Chan Sek Keong. The Court decided that the DG had failed to take into account relevant evidence adduced by the applicant's company which could have been capable of rebutting the prima facie evidence of non-export, and had thus made an insufficient inquiry before arriving at his decision. Since the DG's demand had been based on an incorrect basis of fact and thus had been made contrary to law, the Court granted the applicant an order of prohibition that barred the DG from deducting the sum from certain bankers' guarantees that the applicant's company had lodged with Customs as security.

The case appears to have introduced error of material fact into Singapore case law as a ground of judicial review. While the term error of material fact was not explicitly stated in the case, the Court applied the legal rule laid down in the UK case Secretary of State for Education and Science v. Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council (1976) that a court may interfere with a government decision which has been based on a misunderstanding or ignorance of an established and relevant fact, and/or an incorrect basis of fact.

Courts in several jurisdictions including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK have followed the Tameside decision and recognized error of material fact as a distinct ground of judicial review. In the case E v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (2004), the Court of Appeal of England and Wales set out four essential requirements that must be met in order for the ground of review to be successful. It remains to be seen whether the Singapore courts will adopt this refinement of the Tameside test.