|
by Lim Kit Siang
 The Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid should
stop his three-year “sleeping” on the gross injustice of the land law in the
country allowing forgery of land titles and fraudulent land transfers and should
get Cabinet approval tomorrow to introduce a bill to amend the National Land
Code in the current parliamentary meeting to overrule the Federal Court decision
on Adorna case.
Last week, the Director-General of Lands and Mines Department, Datuk Zoal Azha
Yusof, who was promoted to the post last August from his previous position as
Selangor’s Land and Mines Director, said there is a need to amend the National
Land Code (NLC) to restore property owners’ rights which have been affected by
Adorna Properties Sdn Bhd v Boonsom Bunyanit.
Zoal Azha said he would bring up the matter with the Attorney-General.
How long would this process take? Another two, three or five years?
Such procrastination and insensitivity to the gross injustice created by the
Federal Court’s 2001 decision in Adorna case, which interpreted Section 340 of
the NLC to favour innocent buyers of land transferred through forgery or fraud,
has destroyed the integrity of land titles, leaving the original owners without
any means to recover their land. It reflects very poorly on a government which
claims to be efficient, just and pro-active in allowing a gross injustice in the
land law to stay unchallenged for the past seven years.
The Adorna case is a heart-rending tale which took more than a decade before it
finally ended with gross injustice to the rightful owner.
Boonsom, a woman of Thai descent, owned two plots of land in Tanjong Bungah,
Penang worth about RM12 million. Unknown to her, the land was transferred to a
company, Adorna Properties, by an imposter who in 1989 held herself out as the
true owner who had lost the original title to the land and subsequently obtained
a certified copy of the title.
Upon discovering the fraud, forgery and deceit, Boonsom went to court to
challenge the validity of the transfer of her land to Adorna Properties by the
imposter.
The High Court ruled in favour of Adorna in April 1995, the Court of Appeal
allowed the appeal in March 1997, but the Federal Court headed by Eusoff Chin
overruled the Court of Appeal in favour of Adorna in December 2000. Two
unsuccessful attempts had been subsequently made by Boonyanit’s family (as
Boonsoom had since died) asking the Federal Court to review the main judgment –
in Febrary 2001 and August 2004.
As a result, the current position of the law is that the fraudster and forger is
capable of transferring a good title to a purchaser who buys the subject
property in good faith and for a valuable consideration – spawning crimes of
forgery of land titles by syndicates compromising the computerized land
registration system and implicating “inside people” in the land offices followed
by fraudulent land transfers resulting in several registered proprietors and
purchasers losing millions of ringgit.
From what had been reported in the press, landowners who have fallen victim to
such forgers and fraudsters, as well as the gross injustice of the land law as
laid down by the Federal Court in the Adorna case, easily run into hundreds, and
is a nation-wide problem although it is most prevalent in Kuala Lumpur,
Selangor, Penang and Johore.
As the Minister responsible for the Land and Mines Department for the past three
years, Azmi should explain why he had shut his eyes to such blatant injustice in
the land law which nullifies the constitutional guarantee of sanctity of
property in Article 13 of the Federal Constitution and why he had never taken up
the matter to the Cabinet.
It is also most shocking that in the past seven years of the gross injustice of
the Adorna case, not a single Minister had thought it fit or proper to raise it
in Cabinet on the urgent need to amend the National Land Code to end the
manifest injustice – again providing proof to Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s
strictures on a “half-past six Cabinet”.
 |
News 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Circular No 023/2012: Talk on ISO 9001 | 2008 Quality Management System Certification
Where are you going, my pretty maid?
Where are you going, my pretty maid?
"A-milking, Sir," she said,
"Sir", she said.
"A-milking, Sir," she said.
That was a nice, lovely and innocent nursery rhyme. Except, in such cases, the big syndicates are acting in collusion with certain elements.
It is time for every Member of Parliament to show their mettle and go for a systemic change. The law on "equity's darling" has been on the books for a long time. That law protects the "innocent" purchaser for value without notice of a fraud.
The facts of the Boonsom case DO NOT show the innocence of the parties involved, including some lawyers involved in certain aspects of the entire deal.
A re-trial ON THE FACTS may well put us right. Questions that need to be addressed are the signers of the documents, and even those who were there but did not sign the said documents!