The WG Friendship Plaza project in Suva has hit a legal snag with the High Court ordering its current three directors not to proceed with any advertising for the sale, transfer, lease, or the sale of the property and marketing, advertising, and or selling its strata titles.
This comes after the plaintiffs, Xiaolong Hu and Lijuan Zheng, a couple from China, sought urgent injunctive orders, claiming to be shareholders in the plaza and that their shares were subject to fraudulent execution of a shareholders resolution approving new share issuance in 2019.
They subsequently took Liang Ding, Weixiang Cao and Julian Sung Kong Yuen to court over this issue.
In his December 19 ruling, Justice Dane Tuiqereqere said the allegations by the plaintiffs against the first three defendants were serious.
“They include fraud and dishonesty. As can be seen, there are accusations and counter-accusations made between the plaintiffs and first three defendants.
“The defendants will likely have documents that they too can produce to support their case. Many of the documents will be in Mandarin and no doubt there will be email communications that each party will rely on, most likely also written in Mandarin.”
The judge said it was inevitable that translations of these documents would be required and their veracity as well as the credibility of the witnesses would take centre stage at the trial.
“It is not clear how far the WG Friendship Plaza is from completion. It will, however, not be soon. There appears to still be much construction ahead. Certainly, the construction of the WG Friendship Plaza must be permitted to continue. Orders from this court should not cause the construction to grind to a halt.”
Liang Ding, Weixiang Cao and Julian Yuen have been ordered to file affidavits by January 19, 2024.
