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Roger Tan: “I hope all affected landowners will take immediate steps to collect their titles to prevent any fraudulent transactions.”

©The Star (Used by permission)
by Chelsea L.Y. Ng

• Owners of idle land in Selangor beware
• Selangor government probes multi-million ringgit cheating cases

PETALING JAYA: At least 38,000 titles to land worth millions of ringgit remain uncollected in the land office vault here.

“The uncollected titles are open to risk of fraudulent transactions,” warned Land and Mines deputy director-general Abd Halim Ain, who revealed this to The Star yesterday.

He said he could not give an indication of the land area involved but stressed that the plots were spread across Petaling District, covering prime areas like Petaling Jaya and Subang.

“Some of these titles were ready for collection from before 2003 but the owners do not seem interested in collecting them despite repeated reminders,” Abd Halim said.

“We cannot do much except to keep on sending reminders. We also cannot set a time limit for them to collect (the titles).”

He feared that if the titles were left in the vault too long, there may be a possibility of them falling into the wrong hands through unscrupulous means.

“We do not know when these fraudsters will strike and how,” Abd Halim said.

“My advice to the landowners is to come and collect the titles as soon as possible, especially in the light of the Adorna Properties Sdn Bhd vs Boonsom Boonyanit judgment.”

Asked to comment on this, the Bar Council’s Conveyancing Practice Committee chairman Roger Tan expressed concern over the situation.

“It appears that the landowners are comfortable with the qualified titles in their possession. I hope all affected landowners will take immediate steps to collect their titles to prevent any fraudulent transactions,” he said.

“In the light of the Boonsom Boonyanit case, it is best for them to collect their land titles as soon as possible.”

Boonsom Boonyanit, a Thai woman, lost two pieces of prime land in Tanjung Bungah, Penang, to Adorna Properties after unscrupulous parties forged her signature to sell and transfer the land.

The Federal Court handed down a landmark ruling in 2001 stating that Adorna Properties could rightly claim ownership to the two pieces of land worth millions of ringgit because it was an innocent buyer with “an indefeasible title to the land.”

She lost everything in the end as the apex court ruled in favour of Adorna Properties.

Owners of idle land in Selangor beware

by Charles Fernandez

SHAH ALAM: Owners of idle land in Selangor are falling victim to land scams and in most cases, land ownership changes hands without the knowledge of the original proprietor.

Many landowners only realise their land has changed hands when bills for quit rent are no longer sent to their address at the beginning of the year.

Land scams usually involve syndicates working with the help of staff from the land and district offices.

In one case, a 34-year-old man was caught falsifying land grants, without the knowledge of the landowners. He even forged the signatures of district office employees and the district officer himself.

In another case, a woman only learnt of the fraudulent transfer of ownership of her land when she tried to obtain a replacement grant, as her documents were old and tattered.

There have been instances where the original landowners have in their possession the original land deeds but the ownership is registered under another name and by the time they realise that it was the scam, it was too late.

Under the law, a person who bought a piece of land in good faith is allowed to keep it, regardless of whether the land was fraudulently sold to him.

Last year it was reported that the computerised land registration system in several states had been compromised by syndicates using insiders to forge land titles, resulting in several registered purchasers losing millions of ringgit.

In January 2004, The Star reported that a syndicate had used information supplied by their cohorts at the Selangor land office to sell, mortgage or even use as collateral land belonging to others. The syndicate’s activities were unveiled when police nabbed a 23-year-old man at the land office.

Investigations revealed that 482.44ha of land, some of which were located in prime locations such as near highway projects valued at approximately RM130mil, were transacted since 2003without the knowledge of the landowners.

One of the biggest land scams involves 150 villagers of Kampung Bukit Canggang in Dengkil who were duped into signing over their co-operative’s 205.58ha of land valued at RM237mil in 2003.

And the most recent was on March 7 when a group of 72 smallholders in Dengkil, Selangor, staged a peaceful protest to voice their dissatisfaction for being ousted from land they claimed was rightfully theirs because they had been toiling on the land for the past 20 years as early settlers.

Selangor government probes multi-million ringgit cheating cases

by Dharmender Singh and Charles Fernandez

SHAH ALAM: The Selangor Government has opened investigations into allegations of massive land cheating cases said to run into hundreds of millions of ringgit in the state.

Mentri Besar Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim will personally go through records of all land transactions “tainted” by allegations of fraud.

He will discuss the matter during a special meeting with all nine district officers in the state today.

“We will look at all the records of cases where there have been complaints to ascertain if proper procedures were followed,” he said in an interview with The Star.

One case he would look into was in Kapar, Klang, where a group claimed that the land they had occupied for decades under Temporary Occupancy Licences was awarded to several other parties although they had been willing to buy it.

The group claimed that they were given TOLs for plots of land which they used for farming, business and even their homes but the District Office “had suddenly refused to accept payments to renew the TOL a few years ago”.

The group later found out that the land had been awarded to others, including some people from outside the state, despite their applying for permanent land titles several times without success.

Khalid said his discussion with the district officers would include claims by certain parties over the ownership of a plot of land in Sabak Bernam, where the change of ownership was discovered after the death of the owner.

The family claimed that they were never informed of any change in ownership and only found out after they carried out a search at the local land office.

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