Lapses on the part of some lawyers in submitting duly filled documents to the Land Registry can be attributed to the many high profile, fraudulent land deals reported in the country, a top official said last week.

"The problem is that there are some lawyers who do not physically visit the Land Registry, but assign a subordinate to handle the task of searching for a title deed", says Sumathipala Hettiarachchi, the Land Registrar.

These subordinates, mostly minor employees, are given several signed and franked open search application forms, depending on the number of cases, along with the deeds to be traced, he said.

This means that the details of the deeds to be searched are not entered in the search application form by these lawyers and this is where the trouble starts, Hettiarachchi pointed out.

When these minor employees working for lawyers call over at the Land Registry, they find they lack the knowledge to fill the required form and turn to shady ‘brokers’ hovering around the precincts of the Land Registry, he noted.

The ‘brokers’ then step in and take over the task, and in the process prevail upon these minor employees to part with some forms which are already franked and signed by the lawyers, the Registrar explained.

"They then make use of these ‘search applications’ to elicit details of high value properties, which are later passed on to forgery syndicates which specialise in selling such properties on spurious deeds", he noted.