Over 30 years ago, in the first season of the American TV program ‘Saturday Night Live’, the world was introduced to the Land Shark. This creature, the smartest of all sharks, had the ability to prowl on dry land as well as in the sea and employed the tactic of impersonating legitimate businessmen to trick the unsuspecting into its jaws.

Today, ‘land shark’ has a special meaning for Saudis. It’s used to refer to people who deal illegally in land, asserting claims to land which they do not own or procuring some sort of illegitimate title to land that the quickly sell to unsuspecting others, either directly or as part of a fraudulent investment scheme.

Unfortunately for the government’s reputation, some government employees are corruptly engaged in facilitating the crime through issuing improper certificates and titles.

The problem is growing, according to this Arab News article, and the different sides are making use of modern media techniques to leverage public opinion. While fines and jail terms are being levied against some of the perpetrators, others—apparently with sufficient money and wasta—are finding ways to gain title over land to which they have no actual right. The article linked below gives the details.

Land sharks make a killing out of illegal properties
Samir Al-Saadi | Arab News

JEDDAH: Money and power are the two driving forces behind illegal land grab. Vast tracts of land on the outskirts of Jeddah have, over the past few years, turned into a battleground between illegal real estate investors and municipal authorities.

Samir Ba’sabrain, head of the Monitoring and Land Transgression Committee at the Jeddah Municipality, said big investors, who are aware of the laws they violate, take risks to earn large sums of profit in these multimillion-riyal illegal operations.

The undeveloped overcrowded neighborhoods that have come up on these empty tracts of land are a security hazard, said Ba’sabrain. Speaking about how such land is sold, he said well-connected “big investors” sell land to an allegedly unsuspecting second party — a “small investor” — for a very low price.
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