Commissioners of oaths (CO) will soon be made liable for statutory declarations 9SD) prepared by deponents, to ensure that they are

aware of the contents before attesting the document.

The move is to avoid the SD from being easily available to scammers to cheat in land transaction dealings.

Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Department VK Liew said the Law Reform Committee that he heads is looking into amending the Statutory Declaration Act 1960 to make it mandatory for the CO to read the contents of the SD and only add a signature after being satisfied the contents are not contentious or do not have any element of perjury.

"Under the current Statutory Declaration Act, the CO is only required to attest their signature to affirm that the person has signed in front of him.

"Now we want to ensure that he (CO) has read the contents of the SD and he must be satisfied that the contents ... (are) not contentious and not prejudicial to other persons," he told Bernama .

Liew said the amendment is required in order to prevent the SD from being abused for the purpose of defaming certain personalities or for fraud and forgery.

Liew said there have been many cases where unscrupulous parties had used the SD to cheat land owners by fraudulently transferring land titles.

"They used the SD to say that the landowner is so and so or ABC is the owner of a piece of land, and then use a power of attorney to say that the landowner had transferred power to XYZ to do transaction of the land.

"Then they will say the person has been given the power to sign all the documents," he said.

Liew, a former lawyer, has personal experiences in dealing with such cases where unscrupulous parties forged signatures of landowners on the SD.

"We have to tighten up the law to protect genuine landowners from losing land to this fraudster. The famous case is the Adorna Properties v Boonsom Bonyanit ," he said.

The issue in that case was over the sale of two lots of land in Tanjung Bungah, Penang, belonging to Boonsom Boonyanit, a Thai national.

An imposter claiming to be Sun Yok Eng @ Boonsom Boonyanit had affirmed a SD on June 18, 1988 that she had lost the original title of the land. The imposter then managed to obtain a certified copy of the title from the Land Office.

On April 6, 1989, the imposter affirmed a second SD declaring that the names Mrs Boonsom Boonyanit and Sun Yok Eng @ Boonsom Boonyanit on the title to the land were of one and the same person, that is, Mrs Boonsom Boonyanit (imposter) with a different Thai passport number.

With the declaration, the imposter managed to perfect the registration of the memorandum of transfer in favour of Adorna Properties.

The case was taken to the Federal Court which held that Adorna had obtained an indefeasible title notwithstanding the forgery because it was a bona fide purchaser.

The highly criticised judgment was however overturned by the Federal Court early this year, describing the earlier decision as a "blatant error".

- Bernama