Tag: Case and Fatwa Summary

The Supreme Court held that a group life insurance clause requiring an employee to be “actually at work” on the policy commencement date is directed at employees on ordinary leave, not at employees prevented from attending work by a sudden accident. An employee who died on the morning the policy came into force, following a domestic gas explosion days earlier, was legally deemed to be at work and covered.

The Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs held that the confiscation of a performance bond is a contractual penalty that may only be imposed where a law, regulation, or the contract expressly provides for it. Neither the Tender Law nor the 1999 Standard Contract for the Construction of Buildings and Civil Works permits a government entity to confiscate a contractor's performance bond when it withdraws the works and executes them at the contractor's expense. Once the entity has recovered its price differences, delay fines, and expenses from the contractor, the 1999 Standard Contract requires it to return the bond.

The Supreme Court held that compensation for a wound closed with medical stitches is calculated per stitch, with each stitch treated as a flesh wound (mulhimah) worth 450 Rial Omani under the Supreme Court’s settled case law. Stitching is not treated as a medical procedure attracting a single lump-sum award.

The Supreme Court held that a court assessing injury compensation under Royal Decree 118/2008 must classify each injury on the basis of clear medical reports and state the basis for that classification, and must rely on specialist medical opinion rather than its own assessment. The court also restated its settled rule that pain is compensable only once it has persisted for six months, after which the amount is assessed as hukumat adl.

The Supreme Court held that assessing the harm caused by an injury and determining the compensation that remedies it are matters of fact within the independent authority of the lower courts, and that it will not review such an assessment as long as it rests on sound and logically acceptable reasoning. A contestation that merely disputes the amounts awarded for individual injuries, without identifying a specific error in law, is a factual dispute that the Supreme Court will reject.

The Supreme Court held that a disability percentage is not compensable unless the injury caused a total or partial loss of utility of an organ, and that compensation for bodily injuries cannot be combined with compensation for a general disability percentage, as this results in double compensation.

The Supreme Court held that a blow causing damage to the brain or the membranes surrounding it is compensated as a single constructive amah head wound, entitled to one-third of the diyat under Royal Decree 118/2008, regardless of how many internal effects it produces. Because only visible external head wounds are counted separately, a subdural haematoma and a subarachnoid haemorrhage arising from the same trauma cannot be compensated twice as an amah and a damighah.

The Supreme Court held that a compensation award will not be set aside for errors in the classification or valuation of individual injuries where the total sum awarded does not exceed the injured party’s overall entitlement under the medical reports, because the contesting party’s interest in such a challenge is purely theoretical.

The Supreme Court held that the injury indemnity (arsh) owed to a woman must be calculated on the basis of the female blood money (diyat), which is half that of a man, and that a court may not equalise the two on grounds of fairness where an explicit legislative text exists. The court also confirmed that general pain and headaches are not independently compensable unless they are proven to have become a permanent disability persisting for more than six months.

The Supreme Court held that a party harmed by the non-performance of a contract cannot claim both rescission of the contract and payment of the contract price, even in separate proceedings, because paragraph 1 of article 172 of the Civil Transactions Law prohibits combining the two remedies, and doing so would result in one party being enriched at the expense of the other.