Its deputy director, Eric See-To, questioned if people were expected to forget about the matter after various personalities from the state had claimed that it was a win-win solution and that the state had helped settlers there end their 20-year wait for compensation.
“Now that seven persons have been remanded and RM87 million in bank accounts have been seized, along with the shocking news that at least RM262 million out of the RM1.18 billion (land price) has been paid to third-party consultants, the Selangor people are now told that the state government had nothing to do with the RM1.18 billion sale,” See-To said.
He said the arrests were made by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) after a full forensic audit was conducted on the RM262 million payment.
“It seems that the Selangor government’s ‘Operation Cuci Tangan’ (washing its hands of the affair) has well and truly begun,” he said in a statement today.
The land, known as Alam Mutiara and Alam Utama, covering 2,200 acres (890ha), was sold to private companies in 2016.
MACC had recently arrested six people, two of them Datuks, to assist in its probe into the matter.
A statement yesterday, by PKR’s Subang MP Sivarasa Rasiah, Amanah’s Shah Alam MP Khalid Samad and former Kuala Selangor MP and Amanah strategy director Dzulkefly Ahmad, said neither the settlers nor the Selangor government had anything to do with the negotiated price.
They said the deal was a “private arms-length sale between a willing buyer and a willing seller”.
“However, the role of the Selangor government, when granting consent to the sale, was to impose conditions to resolve in one global settlement the predicament of the 1,000 settlers and also the 30-over legal suits pending in court over this Alam Mutiara/Alam Utama land and another piece of land covering 1,000 acres (Alam Perdana),” the statement said.
See-To said official court documents mentioned that the sale had “the full knowledge, support and sanction of the Selangor state government”, including how the money was divided.
“The court documents said that this is contained in the settlement agreement, the supplemental settlement agreement and the consent judgment,” he said.
Last month, BNSC director Abdul Rahman Dahlan was reported to have asked Selangor Menteri Besar Azmin Ali why the state had “hastily” returned a piece of disputed land to two housing developers in 2016, especially when the High Court and Court of Appeal had, in 2013 and 2014, ruled that the land belonged to the state.
The land in Ijok was initially given to a group of settlers in the state in 1998 by the then-BN state government.
The settlers later agreed to allow two companies, Mujur Zaman Sdn Bhd and LBCN Development Sdn Bhd, to develop the land in exchange for compensation and housing. The land was then sold to a third party.
It was reported that ECO World Development Group Bhd had bought the parcel of land in the northwestern Klang Valley corridor for RM1.18 billion to develop three property projects, worth an estimated RM15 billion in gross development value.
It was from that RM1.18 billion that the state settled a payment of RM300 million to the settlers.
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