Mortmain — the dead hand. England buried the last of it in 1960. Malaysia still carries a fragment, and nobody has explained why.
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The Best Statute Nobody Uses [Part 4/5]
Thirty ringgit turns five mortal trustees into a body corporate that never dies — and escapes the Companies Act entirely.
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Your Trust Is Invisible, and Your Trustee Is Mortal [Part 3/5]
The title names five men. It does not name the trust. And the five are mortal.
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The Oldest Trick in Equity [Part 2/5]
The company may not hold the land. So let it not hold the land. Four hundred years ago the law worked out how.
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Can Your Temple Own the Land It Stands On? [Part 1/5]
A man wants to give land to the temple he has worshipped at for forty years. One sentence stops him.
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Can Your Seller Mortgage the House You Have Already Paid For? [Part 4 – Land Scams]
A bank searched the title, gave a loan against what it saw, and lost the lot. There was no forger anywhere in this story.
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Who Pays When the Forger Has Vanished? [Part 3 – Land Scams]
Malaysia gives the true owner his land back. The duped buyer gets nothing — until the Land Registry was made to pay.
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Can you trust your land title? The hidden dangers you must know, before you lose everything…
“The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.” [Ted Perry, 1971]. Land scams multiply at the speed of a virus. It has many faces. It spreads silently. It strikes without warning. And by the time you realise it, it has destroyed lives. How can you protect yourself? What red flags point to scams?
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There is a client who paid me a king's ransom. This happened many, many years ago. It concerned an elderly ethnic Chinese gentleman and his wife. In the interior of Perak there is a tiny farm. A brook courses through it. On one side of it stood a wooden shack. A family lived there. This Uncle (as we shall call him) was born there. He had an elder brother. After many decades, his ...
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