PENGARAH TANAH & GALIAN NEGERI PERAK

On the court record

A Perak state land authority litigating the cancellation of reservations and wakaf khas, Malay-reservation and orang asli native-customary rights, and the alienation of state land.

Pengarah Tanah & Galian Negeri Perak (the Director of Lands and Mines, Perak State) is the Perak state land authority, and it appears in the corpus as a respondent or defendant in disputes over the reservation and alienation of land, Malay-reservation and native-customary rights, and the consequences of a company's liquidation for land transfers. The matters are argued under the National Land Code and state land enactments.

Reservation and its cancellation are a prominent theme. In one matter residents and a mosque committee challenged the cancellation of a reservation, raising whether a 1910 reservation had created an irrevocable wakaf khas (a specific Islamic endowment), whether reservation under the Enakmen Tanah 1903 (the Land Enactment 1903) had removed the land from the control of the State Authority, and whether the State Authority was empowered under section 64 of the National Land Code to revoke it. A related matter concerned Malay-reservation land said to have been bought at auction by a non-Malay company contrary to sections 7 and 19 of the Malay Reservations Enactment, and the plaintiffs' locus standi to bring the action.

Native-customary rights and alienation also feature. In a Malay-language matter the court considered whether the Semai orang asli (indigenous people) had occupied the Ulu Geruntum area since time immemorial, whether they held native-customary rights over that adat land, and whether there had been an encroachment by a defendant carrying out a hydroelectric project. A judicial review challenged the lawfulness of the alienation of lands to a state development corporation in 2013 by reference to the Perak land rules, and at the Court of Appeal a restitution claim turned on the effect of a company being in Members' Voluntary Liquidation during the sale of land, with the memoranda of transfer said to be void or insufficient instruments under section 360 of the Companies Act. The authority's footprint maps the contested frontier of land reservation, indigenous rights and alienation in Perak.