I recently faced a company that owed its former employee (my client) close to RM 120,000 in unpaid salary. Very irritating case because instead of paying, they kept changing the story every time we cornered them.
The case looked straightforward upon first glance. My Client did the work, he was not paid, he resigned, and they kept telling him to give them more time because cash flow was tight. Three months passed and still nothing, so he engaged us to step in.
The first response from the company was quite odd. Suddenly, they said he was never really an employee and was more like an "independent consultant". But we had his employment letter, fixed monthly salary, company email, staff ID, leave records and EPF contributions. So we shot down that argument quickly enough.
Then they changed position again sial. They said even if salary was owing, he had caused the company losses because he resigned before completing certain projects, and therefore they wanted to set off those losses against his unpaid salary. OK. So I asked them to show the calculation and supporting documents. How much was the loss? How was it caused? Where was the evidence? After that, silence for another few weeks.
The next twist was even better. Throughout the whole matter, they kept saying the company had no money and couldn’t afford to pay. But we found out they were still operating normally, taking on new jobs and paying other suppliers. So the actual problem was not that there was absolutely no money. The real problem was that my client was simply very low on their payment priority list. Cashflow prioritization.
Once we made it clear that the matter was going to escalate to litigation since they did not seem to be taking the claim seriously, suddenly money started appearing.
First they offered RM80,000. We rejected. Then RM100,000. We also rejected. Eventually, the matter settled for the full amount, paid over six monthly instalments.
This is a repeating theme in debt recovery = when a debtor tells you they “cannot pay”, you need to find out whether they genuinely cannot pay, or whether they simply DO NOT WANT to pay you yet.
Rudi Cheu (rudi@rulecolaw.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.