2025-09-02,PUTRAJAYA

The Court of Appeal has criticised the Petaling District and Land Office (PTG) for attempting to conceal errors in the forfeiture of a developer's land in Petaling Jaya.

A three-member panel led by Datuk Mohd Nazlan Mohd Ghazali affirmed the High Court's ruling that the forfeiture of Lot 8914, Bandar Petaling Jaya, belonging to SEA Housing Corporation Sdn Bhd (plaintiff), was unlawful.

Other members of the bench were Datuk Azimah Omar and Datuk Faizah Jamaludin.

The court found that the forfeiture was a "backdoor attempt" to compulsorily acquire land without compensation, in breach of the National Land Code, the Land Acquisition Act 1960 and Article 13 of the Federal Constitution.

The developer was the registered owner of a vast tract of land in Petaling Jaya which was later subdivided into 10 plots with individual titles, six of which were developed in the 1980s into the Sea Park Apartment.

For decades, the company believed its master title had been fully subdivided into 10 plots, but it later emerged that the land had in fact been split into 12, with the final plot quietly left out of its records.

The company only discovered the existence of the disputed lot in March 2016 when it was served with a statutory notice from the land office demanding arrears in quit rent (6A notice).

It was heard during the trial that PTG's own technical division had advised the company to ignore the notice, claiming the lot "did not exist" due to overlap with another plot already owned by the firm.

However, two years later, the PTG moved to forfeit the land on grounds of non-payment and subsequently reserved the plot for public use.

The court also heard that PTG had issued conflicting technical reports and failed to correct title errors despite being aware of them since 2014.

Azimah, who wrote the unanimous decision, held that the land office's conduct went beyond mere technical errors.

"We find that no reasonable person, having admitted to mistakenly recording the plaintiff's landholding within the title and advising them to ignore the 6A notice, would still insist on blaming the plaintiff's non-payment as grounds to unjustly forfeit the land.

"We find that the unreasonable manner in which the PTG misled the plaintiff into believing that Lot 8914 did not exist, and to ignore the 6A notice, had directly deprived the plaintiff of the opportunity to safeguard its landholding and meet its payment obligations.

"PTG had never bothered to appropriately amend the land plan within the title for the subject lot to reflect the amendment or the correction made prior in 2014.

"Had the land plan in the title be amended or the correction be endorsed upon the title itself, the entire confusion as to the existence of the subject lot would have never arisen," she said in her full grounds of judgment dated Aug 11.

Azimah said that since the PTG failed to amend the land plan in the disputed lot, the company could not be faulted for relying on the land office's error, misrepresentation and advice to ignore the 6A notice.

"The PTG was aware of the error and yet opted to not correct the known error.

"Worst still, the PTG was hopeful that the error be kept under wraps and the plaintiff be kept unaware of the error until time would 'allow' the subsequent forfeiture of the subject lot for 'public purpose' - and without paying compensation to the plaintiff," said the court.

On the issue of the two contradictory reports, the court noted that PTG's response was to dismiss its own technical division as irrelevant and argue that the plaintiff should not have had access to the documents.

"Questioning how the plaintiff obtained the reports did nothing to diminish their relevance in exposing the land office's mismanagement and its backdoor move to acquire Lot 8914 in breach of the Land Acquisition Act 1960," the court added.

The court also awarded RM25,000 in costs to the developer.