It is an unlikely setting for a legal fight over a British colonial holdover. But at lunchtime last Monday, a bailiff walked into a serviced office building in the Avenue John F. Kennedy in central Luxembourg to serve an asset seizure notice on two subsidiaries of one of the biggest energy companies in the world, Petronas.

It was a stunning salvo in a $US15 billion ($22 billion) legal battle that centres on a Malaysian state about 11,000 kilometres away, and involves descendants of a former sultan, a land deal with British colonialists, a publicity-shy London-based litigation fund and a dispute 144 years in the making.

Financial Times