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Four acres of land transferred fraudulently using fake documents

Fraudulent transfer of over four acres of prime land belonging to a city-based developer in Sompura village in Sarjapura hobli using the anywhere registration facility in the city has come to light recently.

The property, owned by Ittina Developers, was re-registered using a fraudulent general power of attorney at Anekal sub-registrar’s office, and sold to a third person by registering a sale deed in Banashankari sub-registrar’s office — all without the knowledge of the developer, who had the property registered in their name during 2004.

Under the anywhere registration, any property in Bangalore can be registered in any of the 43 sub-registrars’ offices across the city without any jurisdictional limitations.

“The fraud came to light during the routine check when we found four land parcels with a total extent of about 4.04 acres of alienated land had been registered in the name of a third party,” Manu Ittina, a director of Ittina Developers, said.

Surprise was in store, as it was found that the same person, who was a consenting witness to the 2004 transaction, had created a bogus GPA in his favour and had transferred it to his name. “This bogus GPA had been shown to be executed in his favour by the previous owner, who had died. Later, he sold these land parcels for Rs. 2.07 crore to a third party, who failed to identify the documents as bogus,” he said.

Following this, a case has been registered in Sarjapur police station against the four individuals, including a couple, for committing the fraud, and the District Registrar and Anekal sub-registrar for having failed to ascertain the veracity of the documents. “We have arrested Veerendra Kathuria and Manju Kathuria after verification revealed that the documents were fake,” Sarjapura sub-inspector Prakash confirmed.

Meanwhile, a senior official in the Stamps and Registration Department said the department officials cannot be held responsible since the law does not permit them to reject a document from being registered or question the document. Acknowledging that it is possible to register a bogus document fraudulently using anywhere registration, the official said that lack of unique property number to urban properties was the reason. “However, this is not possible for agriculture land as unique property identification number is given under Bhoomi project.” The official also pointed out that such frauds cannot happen in urban properties registered after 2008 by when Bhoomi (for agriculture) and Kaveri (for urban properties) software platforms for property registration were integrated.