Ombudsman urged to intervene in waterfront land row disputes
An Indian Ocean island nation claimed ownership of almost 800 hectares of former Dutch East Indies (Dutch EEA) land in a dispute with Indonesia, according to an ICIJ inquiry.
The land is controlled by a Dutch shipping firm, TKP Holdings, which has recently begun selling up and selling off its own shipping licences and property, and which has started se바카라lling land as a result.
The ICIJ investigation by its partner, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) found that the Dutch had failed to address the cljarvees.comaim or to stop the sale, and were also unable to demonstrate that the claims raised enough legal issues for the Dutch to block the sale.
“The Dutch government and the Dutch corporate law courts cannot, based on their own records, agree on who owns the EEA. For example, the Dutch government does not have a complete record of all of the EEA claims in Netherlands. And it has not done a thorough analysis of the claim,” said Joost Hooghe, ICIJ’s chief investigative correspondent.
On December 10 last year, the Dutch government asked TKP Holdings to sell 80 hectares of land in the EEA – around four-fifths of the land that Indonesia claims over its entire Borneo archipelago.
The ICIJ’s investigation showed that the Dutch had agreed to settle the claims in the Netherlands by paying TKP the estimated $14.9-15.7m to transfer their rights in the land. The rest of the land was sold, and by January, the two sides had agreed to settle their dispute in order to set up a new government.
However, on February 22, the ICIJ obtained court documents that showed the Indonesian government had no right to purchase the land. On the same day, the ICIJ obtained court records indicating the Dutch government had issued a “confidential order” of transfer of the land to TKP Holdings for a total cost of about $12.6m, including compensation for “damage to rights”.
The land was sold to the Japanese company Kodo Land in 2010 fo바카라r $5.4m, a significant part of a $8m settlement in 2000 to restore the former Dutch East Indies naval base at Taung Fano as a military base.
The transfer of the EEA land is illegal under the international conventions on the peaceful enjoyment of international waters, since it has been administered without judicial approval by the Dutch government and under the law covering the transfer o