Pengarah Pejabat Tanah dan Galian Kerajaan Negeri Pahang

On the court record

A state lands-and-mines authority litigating caveats, alienation, subdivision and mining-lease renewals under the National Land Code and Pahang mineral legislation, its decisions routinely tested by judicial review.

Pengarah Pejabat Tanah dan Galian Kerajaan Negeri Pahang (the Director of the Pahang State Lands and Mines Office) is the state land-and-mines authority, and it appears in the corpus as a respondent or applicant in disputes over caveats, land alienation and subdivision, and mining leases in Pahang, argued under the National Land Code and state mineral legislation and largely in Malay.

Land-administration questions recur. One matter concerned a private caveat under section 323 of the Kanun Tanah Negara (the National Land Code) and an application to remove it, turning on whether there was a caveatable interest and an interest in praesenti where a Form 19B referred to a negotiated agreement to return land and there was a dispute over an unpaid balance of the sale price. Other matters engaged the machinery of the Code directly: an appeal against an alienation of title by the State Authority under section 418 was dismissed with costs, and an application for subdivision under section 145 was allowed after a full trial.

Mining and judicial review complete the picture. In one administrative-law matter the challenge was to a refusal to renew a mining lease, the court holding that only a lessee is entitled to apply for renewal under the Pahang Mineral Enactment 2001 and the Pahang Mineral Regulations 2005, and dismissing the judicial-review applications with costs. Related proceedings addressed the leave stage of judicial review, including an objection that the time to seek leave had lapsed and an amendment to the leave application, and a separate application to stay the execution of a judicial-review order, where the court asked whether the test was the same as for a stay of a monetary judgment. The authority's role is that of the state gatekeeper over title, subdivision and mineral rights, whose decisions are routinely tested by judicial review.