Palm | Kelapa Sawit

With the growing number of land scams and increased value of property involved, serious measures, including protectioBy the law, are urgently needed to overcome the problem.

WHEN Taiwanese businessman Chen Wei Pin, 56, acquired a piece of land in the heart of Kuala Lumpur in 1990, he never expected to be a victim of land fraud.

He was shocked to learn that the Land Office’s computerised records showed that a private caveat had been entered by a director of a company, claiming that Chen had sold the land to his company.

Chen denies any knowledge of the transaction and although he holds the original title to his land, attempts to retrieve records of his ownership at the Land Office have proved unsuccessful. There is also no memorandum of transfer on the sale to the private company.

He has since lodged a report with the Anti-Corruption-Agency (ACA).

Chen’s case is not isolated; there have been numerous other cases of land fraud. In a parliamentary session recently, Deputy Internal Security Minister Datuk Johari Baharum said that 16 cases were recorded in 2001, 19 in 2002, 22 in 2003, 32 in 2004, 35 in 2005 and 40 in 2006. There were 16 cases in the first five months of this year.

Police statistics however reveal that in 2006, there were 80 cases involving land worth RM4,874,567.30, while this year (up to October) there have been 49 cases involving land worth RM10,402,559.00 (See table on Page 29).

MCA Public Services and Complaints Department, meanwhile, has received 18 such complaints involving land worth RM30mil in the past five years.

The department's legal adviser Datuk Theng Book believes that such cases are on the rise.

“After publicising Chen’s case, we received many more calls from lawyers about this problem. Many of these cases seem to happen in KL and Selangor where the value of land is high,” he said.

“We are concerned over the numerous unsolved cases. There is a problem; just how are we going to solve the problem then?” said National House Buyers Association Secretary-General Chang Kim Loong.

The situation where a landowner can lose his land even though he holds a good title is a direct result of the Federal Court's decision in Adorna Properties Sdn Bhd v Boonsom Boonyanit. This case concerned the interpretation of the law as laid out in Section 340 of the National Land Code (NLC) 1965 (see sidebar).

In this now-infamous case, Boonsom Boonyanit, a Thai national, owned some land in Penang. She eventually discovered that an impostor claiming to be her – and with supporting identification documents as well as statutory declarations – had declared that she had lost the original title and managed to obtain a replacement title from the land office.

The impostor subsequently sold the land to Adorna Properties, who bought it on good faith, and did not suspect that there was anything amiss in the transaction.

When Boonyanit sued for the return of the land at the Penang High Court, she was unsuccessful. She appealed to the Court of Appeal (COA), which decided in her favour. However, Adorna Properties then made an appeal to the Federal Court, and won. In essence, Boonyanit – who has since passed away – lost her land without receiving a single sen for it.

Because it was a decision of the highest court in the land, it has to be followed by every other (lower) court in the country. A subsequent attempt to overturn the previous decision, made by Boonyanit's estate, was also defeated in the Federal Court.

As a result of this case, assistant professor Dr Sharifah Zubaidah Syed Abdul Kader of the Public Law Department of the International Islamic University Malaysia said: “The law now does not protect landowners – especially in cases of forgery. Even if they are able to prove the title is theirs, they can still lose their land. The court will inevitably rule against them as long as it can be proven that the purchaser bought it on good faith.”

Source: The Sunday Star in Malaysia Bar