Yung Kee Restaurant on Wellington Street in Hong Kong is justly famous for the delicious goose it serves to hungry diners beating a path to its doors. In Re Yung Kee Holdings Ltd (CFA), the family which founded Yung Kee Restaurant and has operated the restaurant for three generations served up a seminal case involving how a court should approach a petition to wind up an unregistered foreign company on the just and equitable ground. Petitions to wind up such foreign companies tend to be creditor petitions on the ground that a company has not been able to pay its debts. Yung Kee Holdings Ltd ("the Company") was an ultimate holding company, and was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands ("BVI"). The famous restaurant, various properties and other business interests were held by Hong Kong entities, and were indirectly held by the subject company through another intermediary BVI company, Long Yau Ltd. In granting the petition to wind up the Company, the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal signed the order for the present restaurateurs to sing their swan song.

Legal recognition of indigenous land rights for the indigenous peoples in the Malaysian state of Sarawak is still in an unfortunate state. Despite being the largest ethnic group of the state and enjoying benefits under the federal system, the fight to hold onto their traditional customs is far from over. The recent Malaysia Federal Court rulings in Sandah (No 1) and (No 2) illustrated this point as the court denied their native customary rights on their ancestral land and also their rights to have their case heard by at least one judge with Bornean judicial experience. With no clear law to shed light on the legal existence of their traditional customs as well as the Constitution's silence on the requirement to have at least one judge with Bornean judicial experience, the Federal Court's endeavour to resolve these issues merits attention. This paper thus reviews and comments on the decisions of the Federal Court, with special focus on the implications for the federal system.