Design Team 3 (Private) Limited and Another v. Urban Development Authority and Others – CA WRIT/491/2021-2021

In Design Team 3 (Private) Limited (Singapore) and Archt. Athula Amarasekera v. Urban Development Authority (UDA) and others, the court addressed whether a writ of Prohibition should be issued to prevent the UDA from acting on a Certificate of Conformity (CoC) for the Altair Project, certified by an architect other than the Petitioners, following the contractual termination between the Petitioners and the Developer. It was held that the dispute was fundamentally a commercial one lacking genuine public interest concerns, rendering judicial review inappropriate, particularly where parallel civil proceedings existed. The principle reaffirmed is that the judicial review process should not be misused to resolve private contractual or commercial disputes disguised as matters of public interest.