PERAK Perak Pakatan Rakyat revealed today that the state government has removed all its banners boasting about land given away for development purposes, just two weeks after these were put up all over the state.

The reason for this is that the BN Perak government could no longer take the heavy criticism against it for giving away all these land to its cronies, the opposition coalition said today.

NONE Perak Pakatan chairperson Nizar Jamaluddin, secretary Khairudin Abdul Malek, Perak DAP chairperson Ngeh Koo Ham and Perak PAS election director Asmuni Awi made this announcement at a press conference.

According to one picture of a banner distributed to the media, the boast in the banner is that the Perak government had given away 112,546.7 acres of land to the people for housing, industrial and agricultural purposes.

Khairudin told Malaysiakini later that the banners were put up all over Perak from the of February this year, but they all disappeared in the later part of March, just before caretaker Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak announced the dissolution of Parliament.

Over the past several months, Nizar told the journalists, not even one ordinary citizen had told them that he or she had obtained land from the state government.

He accused the state government of alienating state land to its cronies at a very cheap price, causing the people of Perak to suffer losses from their assets.

State questioned, but no answer at all

"For the last two weeks we have been asking the state government who got the said 112,000 acres of land and there has been no answer (from the caretaker Menteri Besar Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir). The answer should be ‘cronies'.

NONE "Therefore, this is why the banners boasting about the state's distribution of the land were ordered to be taken down," Nizar said.

Nizar claimed that based on documentary evidence he obtained from his sources within the state executive council, these land parcels, were located in places including Gopeng, Beruas and Lumut and were given to more than 10 crony companies.

For example, he said, the state government had approved a plot of prime land worth millions of ringgit to a company, at the premium price of RM50,000.

The Perak government had also assigned another plot of prime land it owned next to the Shangri-la Rasa Sayang resort hotel in Batu Ferringhi, Penang, Nizar said, to another company to build a three-star hotel.

This was awarded without an open tender called and the crony company was only required to pay RM190,000 for the land for the first 10 years.

In other words, Nizar said, the state government would earn RM15,833 a month on the plot.

Part of Pangkor incinerator land also given off

“The land costs close to RM500 per square foot, but the state government is only getting RM15,833. What kind of investment is this, giving to a crony company without an open tender?” he added.

Meanwhile, Ngeh also revealed that the state government had given part of the land set aside for the second phase of a garbage incinerator on Pangkor Island to a crony company for a plant to build boats.

Ngeh expressed worry that this would affect the incinerator as its land area had been reduced.

Nizar called on Zambry to come clear to the people of Perak on these matters. Pakatan, he added, has also lodged reports with Malaysian Anti-corruption Commission on some of these cases.