KUALA SELANGOR: Ijok settlers will seek a court order to compel the Selangor government to return a third of 1,200ha of land at the centre of a controversy to them.
Counsel Kamarudin Ahmad, who is representing the settlers, said this is because the agreement between the settlers and two developers only involved 800ha of land, while 400ha belonged to the state government.
“The total area of settled land (in the controversy) is 1,200ha. But this was seized by the Selangor government in 2009 after the developers appointed by the settlers failed to develop the land.
“The question is, if 800ha of the land which the Selangor government had seized could be returned to the two developers for sale to a third party, why can’t the remaining 400ha be returned to the settlers?
“If the Selangor government refuses to hand back the 400ha of land, it should at least compensate the settlers based on current land prices. I have been asked by some 200 of the settlers to claim their rights in court,” he said after a discussion on the Ijok land issue here.
Present at the discussion were Selangor Barisan Nasional deputy chairman Datuk Mat Nadzari Mat Dahlan and Kuala Selangor member of parliament Datuk Seri Dr Irmohizam Ibrahim.
Kamarudin said, based on current prices, each settler stands to receive some RM500,000 as compensation for the land.
“We believe that the agreement (between the state government and the developers) was one-sided. Before this, the settlers only received RM300 million of the RM1.18 billion from the sale of the 800ha of land. It looks like settlers again have lost out and become victims of certain parties looking to make easy money,” he said.
The land issue in Ijok has become a hot topic of late, with calls for the Selangor government to compensate settlers fairly.
Other issues also arose from the sale of the land, including the appointment of legal firm Daim & Gamany by the state government to represent the settlers.
BN strategic communications deputy director Eric See-To had said the appointment of the law firm raised many questions as it was linked to a prominent PKR member of parliament.
He had questioned whether the legal firm had informed the settlers of the sale of the 800ha of land for RM1.18 billion, with only RM300 million going to them and the remainder to the two developers.
He had also claimed that the settlers were not aware that the developers had proposed to develop a RM15 billion project there.