Owners of idle land in Selangor beware

03/04/2008 The Star 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.

Prolonged issue: The Kampung Sri Tanjong land committee members gathering in Dengkil to stage a peaceful protest.

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.