Federal Territories Minister Tan Sri Annuar Musa today denied selling 42 plots of land belonging to the Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL) as alleged recently.
He asserted that he has never received any application to sell the land since being appointed to the post eight months ago and promised legal action against Cheras MP Tan Kok Wai for alleging so.
“I want to stress that until this very second today, there is not a single application from DBKL that I have received, requesting to sell their assets.
“I also want to say that DBKL won’t sell its assets unless there are certain strong reasons to do so, which we need to consider,” he told a press conference at Parliament.
Annuar said he is very disappointed with Tan’s accusation as the latter was an experienced MP.
He added that Tan could ask him questions about the land sale in the Dewan Rakyat and that he would reply there but chose to “attack another MP” instead.
The minister said the allegations were serious and had led to public criticism against him on social media, including Facebook and Instagram.
“He chose to speak outside Parliament so he will be subject to laws outside and I have told my lawyer to take legal action following existing processes,” said Annuar.
Tan had yesterday questioned the sale of the 42 plots of land, asking if they had followed the book, claiming that the process seemed rushed.
He had based his allegation against Annuar on how DBKL had published three notices to alter the existing Kuala Lumpur City Plan 2020 in recent months.
He said the latest notice indicated changes to 33 plots of DBKL-owned land while the earlier two notices indicated changes to three and six plots, respectively.
Asked about this today, Annuar clarified that these alteration requests had come from private landowners, not DBKL.
“Does a plan-change equate land sales by DBKL? We need to ask him (Tan) this.
“To my knowledge, this has nothing to do with land sales. The second thing here is – as far as I know, these applications (to change the land-use provisions) are applications from private landowners,” he explained.
Annuar elaborated that landowners had a legal right to apply to DBKL to change the land-use terms under which their land had been gazetted in the KL City Plan 2020.
“The case of the 42 (plots) is private landowners applied to DBKL for the structural plan to be changed so they can develop their land,” he said.
On Tuesday (Nov 17), the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman Wong Kah Woh said that based on its proceedings, it found that DBKL did not have any SOP for the disposal or sale of its land.
He said there were 97 transactions of DBKL land that were carried out without referring to any standard operating procedure since 2011.
Meanwhile, Annuar said the 97 transactions were made during the former Pakatan Harapan and Barisan Nasional administration.
“Pakatan had the chance in the 22 months when they were the government, they should have resolved it.
“If there are unresolved issues, we, the Perikatan Nasional government, will continue to follow up on these issues based on current procedures,” he said.
Annuar added that he has instructed his ministry to scrutinise and improve the current SOPs for the disposal or sale of DBKL land.