Thursday, August 18, 2011

Interest Scheme: Golden Palm Growers declares payout

Golden Palm Growers Bhd (GPGB) has declared its first dividend of eight per cent for the Golden Palm Growers' Scheme, an oil palm investment scheme targeted at local retail investors.

The scheme, launched on Aug 20 last year, enables investors to share profit from an oil palm plantation in Gua Musang, Kelantan.

GPGB holds a 90-year concesssion to develop, manage and maintain a 4,512-hectare plantation.

The land is owned by an agency of the Kelantan state government.


GPGB is a subsidiary of Sterling Plantations Sdn Bhd which in turn is wholly-owned by Sterling Biofuels International Ltd, a company listed on the Australian stock exchange.

Executive chairman of Golden Palm Growers Bhd, Andrew Phang,said the planting of oil palm trees started last year and the first harvest was expected by 2014.

The scheme involves a minimum investment of RM8,000 for a quarter acre plot; investors are guaranteed six per cent return per annum fully backed by cash deposit with a licensed trustee.

"If crude palm oil prices exceed RM1,500 per metric tonne investors will be guaranteed a minimum return of nine per cent per annum in the next 17 years," Phang said.

To date, according to Phang, over 8,000 grower plots had been sold.

"Oil palm has a long history and a bright sustainable future, especially as biofuels are seen as an important energy source in time to come replacing fossil fuels," he said.

Read more: Golden Palm Growers declares payout http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BTIMES/articles/20110818184523/Article/index_html#ixzz1VNb205Uq




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Palm scheme to pay first dividend


KUALA LUMPUR: A year after its launch, Golden Palm Growers’ Scheme will pay investors its first guaranteed dividend payout of 6% with an additional 2% discretionary bonus dividend by the end of this month.
A first of its kind, the scheme guarantees a net yield of 6% for the first six years or a minimum return of 9% per annum if crude palm oil price exceeds RM1,500 per tonne in the 23-year period of investment.
After the first six development years, the scheme will move into full profit-sharing when profits from the total plantation will be distributed to investors according to the number of plots they invested in.
“This encouraging results strengthen our belief that making oil palm investment accessible to everyone is the right move,” Golden Palm Growers Bhd (GPGB) executive chairman Andrew Phang said at a briefing yesterday.
GPGB, the company providing the scheme, also announced a 30% increase in asset valuation in the past 10 months, making the plantation worth RM71.5mil as at June compared with RM55mil in August last year when the scheme was introduced.
The company holds a 90-year concession to develop, manage and maintain the oil palm plantation on 11,280 acres owned by an agency under the Kelantan government.
The plantation is expected to make its first harvest at the end of 2013.
“Of the total acreage, 19,600 plots were initially made available for sale to local investors or ‘growers’,” Phang said, adding that GPGB had allocated 4,000 acres more for the scheme on top of its initial 7,000 acres.
The company said 60% of the 11,000-acre plantation in Gua Musang, Kelantan, was under development now and about 8,000 plots had been taken up.
The size of each plot is a quarter of an acre.
Source: BizStar

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Google Backing Of DIY Legal Forms Will Force Lawyers To Lower Fees


Google captured the headlines this week with its purchase of Motorola Mobility. But this big deal has overshadowed a smaller one last week that will drastically transform the way we consume legal services. And in the long run it may have an even more profound impact.
As Forbes senior editor Daniel Fisher reported here, Google Ventures is part of the group that invested $18.5 million in Rocket Lawyer, one of a growing number of web-based services that can spew out documents like wills, leases and incorporation papers for a fraction of what many lawyers charge. In a separate deal, its competitor, LegalZoom, raised $66 million of venture capital last month from Kleiner Perkins and Institutional Venture Partners, among others.
While venture capitalists see gold in the do-it-yourself legal movement, the latest developments make me cringe. I’m all for educating consumers about legal issues – I’ve spent most of my career doing just that, most recently in my book, Estate Planning Smarts. But having also worked as a lawyer, I know how complicated writing documents can be. In fact, I make a hobby of collecting horror stories about consumers who get in trouble by acting as their own lawyers. You’ll find some doozies in my Forbes story, “The Case Against Do-It-Yourself Wills.”
In a pinch, both LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer can help people connect with a live lawyer, but I have several objections to this arrangement. One involves the quality of the advice people are likely to get. At Rocket Lawyer, it costs $19.95 a month. That’s far less than I recently paid my plumber to install a new flushometer in the toilet.
In addition, the premise of both companies is that consumers will use the online documents to avoid lawyers altogether – that’s what attracts them to LegalZoom or Rocket Lawyer in the first place. So they can’t be counted on to ask for help, even when they need it. Spotting potential trouble spots is one of the things lawyers do. Chances are laymen will be dangerously ignorant of what they don’t know.
Consumers can profit from the latest developments, but not in ways that Rocket Lawyer, LegalZoom or the venture capitalists contemplate. Here’s how: they can use the widespread availability of DIY documents as a tool for negotiating reasonable legal fees. The same technology that has spurred the DIY movement has made it much easier for lawyers to do their jobs. Whether lawyers use their own forms or a commercial product, in many cases it is possible to prepare documents in minutes. They have no right charging for them as if they were being custom crafted and written with a quill pen.
Sourced from Forbes

50 ways to leave your lawyer

Sourced from The Economist:



CONVENTIONAL law firms charge vast hourly fees and then hand the work to underlings while the partners play golf at clubs their clients are too poor to join. At least, that is how it seems to many clients, whose irritation at being overcharged turned to fury during the recession.
Some clients are switching to unconventional law firms, which claim to offer equally good lawyering for much less money. Take Clearspire. The firm’s 20 or so lawyers work mostly from home, collaborating on a multi-million-dollar technology platform that mimics a virtual office. A lawyer checking in on a colleague automatically sees a picture of her on the phone when she is, in fact, on the phone. Clients use the platform too, commenting on and even changing their own documents as they are being drawn up. Conventional lawyers are far less open.


From the start, Clearspire offers cost estimates for each phase of a legal job. Employees who underestimate how long it will take cannot simply jack up the bill—they must take the hit themselves. But if a lawyer finishes his work faster than promised, he gets a third of the savings. The client also gets a third, as does Clearspire. This gives everyone a stake in making the process more efficient and predictable.
Bryce Arrowood, the founder, notes that law firms reward partners who bring in business, and not necessarily the most brilliant lawyers. Yet clients’ priorities are exactly the reverse. So Clearspire has an unusual dual structure. American law firms cannot have non-lawyers sharing fees with lawyers. (Britain used to be the same, but will ditch this pointless rule this year.) So Clearspire must be two entities: a law firm, with salaried employee-lawyers rather than partners, and a second company that focuses on bringing in business and supporting the lawyers.
The discount for clients is sweet. George Kappaz is a private-equity boss who recently gave a complex job to Clearspire (structuring an equity package for Astrata, one his fund’s firms). He estimates that it cost a quarter of what he would have paid the big firms he used before, and Clearspire’s work was just as good. (Many of its lawyers come from top-notch law firms.) Mr Kappaz predicts that the Clearspire model, or something like it, will revolutionise the legal business.
Perhaps so, but for Clearspire it is early days. Can it make money? A company like 11-year-old Axiom proves that clients have an appetite for alternative models. Axiom either seconds some of its hundreds of lawyers to a company, takes on a whole chunk of a client firm’s legal work (such as commercial contracts), or performs “discovery” (reviewing documents for litigation). Rather than charging by the hour for each lawyer, it asks for a single flat fee, or charges for a team by the week or the month. Expenses are kept low by having headquarters in SoHo, a chic bohemian bit of New York, and by stashing many lawyers in even cheaper places such as Houston and Hyderabad.
The recession was good to Axiom. After it sent its consultants, recruited from the likes of McKinsey and Accenture, to clients to help them trim their legal spending, the clients gave Axiom more work. Revenue grew from $55m in 2008 to $80m in 2010. This year the firm expects to rake in $120m. Companies were always under pressure to cut their legal bills, says Mark Harris, Axiom’s boss. But “fake pressure” before became “real pressure” during the downturn.
Axiom and Clearspire serve some of America’s biggest companies. Other entrepreneurs are aiming at small-business clients. These would normally take a chance on finding the right sole practitioner or small firm. But on LawPivot, a year-old social-networking website for lawyers and those who need them, potential clients post questions (up to three a month), and lawyers provide free, brief answers. The lawyers make nothing, but use the service to drum up custom. Clients can test a lawyer’s skill before opening their wallets.
LawPivot is a social-networking site, not a law firm—it will make its money initially by charging lawyers to upgrade their profiles (similar to the networking profiles on LinkedIn). Google Ventures is a backer, and Apple’s former top lawyer for mergers and acquisitions is a co-founder. This kind of heft will bring it up against LegalZoom, the biggest seller of online forms and easy, repeatable legal services for small businesses and individuals. LegalZoom now wants to put more of its contract lawyers to work directly for clients at a flat rate.
It is more than a decade since the internet made book-buying cheaper and more convenient. If technology now helps cut gargantuan legal bills in America and elsewhere, it will be better late than never.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Tougher land fraud deterrence

Sourced from the Malay Mail


The Land and Mines Department is tightening up loose ends to give better protection for genuine land owners from fraudsters.
In an exclusive interview with The Malay Mail recently, the department's senior officials said the changes were part of their proposal to amend the National Land Code (NLC) 1965.
Land and Mines director-general Datuk Azemi Kassim said the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry was eager to see a new set of rules to better protect property owners from unscrupulous syndicates.
"We are aware of land scams in the country. We are now trying to minimise such scams and this can be done with an amended NLC."
He said the department was in the midst of consulting relevant parties before drawing up the final paperwork by year-end.
Upon getting the Cabinet's green light, the department hopes the proposal will be tabled in Parliament by the middle of next year.
Azemi said about 75 per cent of the NLC needed to be amended. Among the proposed changes are the introduction of the Certificate of Correctness as an additional document when transferring land to another person and to implement the biometric system to ensure authenticity of a seller's identity.
The Malay Mail had reported on syndicates obtaining original land titles by forging documents, such as identity cards, letter of undertaking and signatures, and selling the land without property owners' knowledge.
Our probe on fake document-producing syndicates was made following our July 26 expose on a land grab case in Shah Alam involving Datin Murnina Sujak, whose four plots of land in Bukit Jelutong was sold by an impostor without her knowledge.
In the case, a woman named "Elizabeth George" managed to execute the deal using a fake MyKad and driving licence that bore her face but Murnina's personal details.

Land offices need to subscribe to NRD online service

Our investigation led to the admission by Selangor Land Office assistant director Nazrul Shukri Ali that they did not have an infallible method to ensure land titles were granted to rightful owners.
He also admitted thumbprint scanners in the State land offices were offline as their system was not linked with the National Registration Department (NRD). This was clarified by the NRD in our Aug 2 report.
On this, Azemi said thumbprint scanners distributed to the land offices were in working order, just that some of them had not subscribed to the NRD's online service.
"NRD handed us 180 units of scanners which we handed to the states. To have real-time details of the persons intending to transfer land ownership, land offices need to subscribe to the NRD's online service.
"With the introduction of the biometrics system, states will have no choice but to go online."
He said biometrics were already being used at the Federal Territory Land Office and the Temerloh District Office in which RM97,000 was spent to introduce the system in the latter office.
He said the Petaling district office, and two offices in Perak and Kelantan would have the system in place by early November.
"The Perak Land Office held a meeting a few weeks ago and they plan to introduce a similar system at the Kampar and Teluk Intan district offices."
Azemi also stressed land grab scams had been gradually reduced over the years.
"We have had cases where several land officers were involved with syndicates, including in Perak and Selangor. In 2009, a clerk from the FT office was arrested. We have not heard of any other case since."
Meanwhile, Land and Mines Office research and development director Mohd Shukri Ismail said the Certificate of Correctness would ensure lawyers' responsibility when dealing with land and property transfers.
"It will be part of the memorandum of transfer document. We will also conduct checks on the law firm and lawyers dealing with us.
"It is something practised in New Zealand and we feel it is high time to introduce it here. But we would like to know the Bar Council's stand before introducing it."
Also present in our discussion with Azemi and Mohd Shukri in Putrajaya were land management and legislation director Kamaruddin Mohd Taib, computerised land management director Mohamed Kamil Mohamed and computerised land management deputy director Ruhaimi Che Jusoh.

Certificate of Correctness

Certificate of Correctness
ACCORDING to the "Registrar-General of Land, Information Paper 2000/01: The certificate of correctness under the Land Transfer Act" by BE Hayes, the Certificate of Correctness was first seen in the New Zealand land system in 1870.
Here, a lawyer (when a lawyer is acting) has to sign a Certificate of Correctness. To give this certificate, the lawyer must be satisfied (among other conditions) with the identity of the person who has signed the instrument.
Hayes had illustrated the Basis of the Practitioner's Certificate of Correctness. (see graph above)
The article "Identity Fraud" published on lawlink.co.nz, stated: "It is important for lawyers to check on the identity of new clients.
Lawyers also have an obligation to check on a client's identity under the Financial Transactions Reporting Act 1996 (which is aimed at detecting money laundering).
In the future, lawyers are therefore more likely to request clients to produce original identification, and may ask for a second document to confirm identification."

Changes to deter land scams

● SUBSCRIPTION to National Registration Department (NRD): State and district land offices are advised to subscribe to the online NRD services to check the details of parties involved in transactions.
● Upgrade computer land registration system to version 2.8.4: Thirty of the 101 land offices in the country use the new system. Among the features include a "push email" feature where, once a land is registered, a copy of the transaction will be emailed to the law firm. There are also better firewalls to avoid hacking.
● Bar codes on original land titles.
● Checks at counter: Experienced land officers will be placed at the counters to vet documents before  proceeding with transfer application.
● Cooperation with police: Police to conduct audit trails if required to help investigations. This will enable cops and the Land and Mines Department to pin point officers involved in the transaction.
● Advertisements: The Land and Mines Department, in collaboration with the National Film Department, have produced and aired several advertisements advising property owners to pay their assessment to encourage them to check their land ownership status.
● Data cleaning: About RM5 million was spent to clean the records and data system for several States including Negri Sembilan, Selangor, Pahang, Kuala Lumpur, Terengganu and Putrajaya.
This was done to ensure records were updated while irrelevant files were deleted from the system.

History of the NLC

THE National Land Code (NLC) 1965 is the highest law related to land matters in Peninsular Malaysia. The NLC does not apply to Sabah, Sarawak and Labuan.
The Acts embedded in the NLC, however, does not and cannot override any prior law or decisions made before the NLC was fully implemented.
Nevertheless, the NLC has come under fi re for failing to protect property owners from losing their properties through land scams.
In the Adorna Properties Sdn Bhd vs Boonsom Boonyanit case in 2001, the Federal Court protected the buyer of such properties, leaving the real owner with little recourse. This decision was overturned by the same court last year, plugging a loophole in the law and now allowing owners who lost their land to fraudsters to redeem their right to their property.
In 2007, the MCA Public Services And Complaints Department recorded 16 cases of land scams with a total worth of RM20 million.