Where Sri Lankan land has been transferred without the owner's consent, the immediate work is to establish from the register exactly what was done and on what instrument, to put the world on notice that the transaction is disputed, and to challenge it before the land passes to a purchaser who can claim to have bought in good faith.
An owner living abroad usually discovers this in one of three ways: a relative mentions building work, a routine title search before an intended sale returns a stranger's name, or a bank writes about a mortgage nobody granted. By then the transaction is often months or years old, which is precisely why the response has to be ordered correctly rather than emotionally.
First establish which problem you have
These look the same from a distance and are answered differently.
In the first, no power of attorney is involved at all. Someone impersonated the owner, or a signature was forged, and a notary attested a deed on that basis. The transaction is challenged as a nullity: the person who purported to convey had no capacity to do so, and nothing passed.
In the second, a power of attorney exists and is the instrument the attorney relied on. The question is then narrower and more technical: did the power authorise this transaction, was it still alive when the transaction was done, and were the statutory formalities complied with. That question is frequently answered in the owner's favour by the terms of the Ordinance itself rather than by any evidence about what was intended.
Why the power of attorney is often already dead
The Powers of Attorney Ordinance was rewritten by amendments in 2022 and 2024, and the effect on old family arrangements has not reached most of the people relying on them.
Section 3C provides that a power of attorney executed by anyone other than a State institution is valid for only five years from the date of execution, unless the instrument specifies its own period of validity or is earlier revoked. A power a family gave a trusted relative in 2016 and never thought about again may or may not be spent, and the answer turns on registration rather than on section 3C. Section 8(1)(b) of the 2022 amending Act preserves a pre-commencement power that was registered and not revoked, which continues until it is revoked or cancelled under section 4. An unregistered one is the opposite case: it became null and void on 25 October 2024.
Section 3D provides that no person other than a State institution may execute an irrevocable power of attorney, which removes the instrument on which a great many informal security arrangements were built.
The transitional rules cut harder still. A power executed before the 2022 amendment and duly registered continues in force until revoked. One that was never registered had a two-year window to be registered under the 2024 amendment, and that window closed on 25 October 2024, after which such an instrument is null and void. An attorney who acted in 2025 on an unregistered power from 2019 was acting on a piece of paper with no legal life in it.
A word of caution against over-reading this. The consequences of a transaction done on a spent or void power are a matter for the court, and third parties who dealt in good faith will argue their own position. The point for the owner is that the instrument's status is a documented fact obtainable from the Registrar General, and it is the first thing to establish.
What the notary was required to do
Section 3B places a duty on the notary attesting a deed in respect of a transaction within section 3A, which is to say the land transactions that must be notarially executed under the Prevention of Frauds Ordinance. The notary must examine the relevant volumes and folios in the Registrar General's department, be satisfied that the power of attorney has not been revoked or cancelled, and state that fact in the attestation. The notary must also retain copies of the identity documents of the grantor and the attorney and a copy of the power itself.
That duty generates evidence. A deed whose attestation contains no such statement, or a notarial record with no retained identity documents, tells its own story, and the notary's protocol and the Registrar General's folios are both obtainable. Where the deed is said to have been executed by the owner personally, the same records are where an impersonation begins to show: section 3A requires, for a power executed abroad, a copy of the grantor's passport bio page signed by the grantor, and comparable identity material features in ordinary notarial practice.
Protecting the register while you argue
The greatest risk after an unauthorised transfer is not the transfer itself but the next one. A registered proprietor can sell on, and a purchaser who takes without notice of the dispute is a much harder opponent than the person who took the first deed.
The answer is to make the dispute visible on the register. Where an action affecting land is instituted, registering it as a lis pendens means anyone searching the folio sees that the land is in litigation, which both deters purchasers and undermines any later claim to have bought in ignorance. That registration is a standard incident of land litigation in Sri Lanka and is described, in its partition context, in partition actions in Sri Lanka. Whether interim relief restraining dealings is available in addition is a matter for counsel on the facts, and it is the kind of application that is made in the first weeks or not at all.
The criminal dimension, and its limits
Forgery and the misuse of a power of attorney may found criminal complaints as well as civil proceedings, and a complaint to the police or to the relevant investigating authority is often made alongside the civil action. It is worth being clear about what that achieves. A criminal complaint may produce investigation, pressure and, eventually, prosecution. It does not by itself cancel a deed or restore your name to the register. The civil action does that, and the two run in parallel rather than as alternatives.
Revoking a power that is still alive
Where the attorney is still in place and the concern is what they might do next, the Ordinance provides a fast route. Section 4 requires notice to the other party, execution of an instrument of revocation, abroad before a Sri Lankan mission officer or a locally authorised attestor, and registration with the Registrar General cross-referenced to the original. Where that cannot wait, the grantor or his Attorney-at-Law may lodge an immediate notice in the prescribed form and the Registrar General endorses the folios at once, but that notice is valid for only three months, within which the formal instrument must follow.
For an owner abroad who has lost confidence in an attorney, that endorsement is the emergency brake, and the three-month limit on it is the deadline most often missed while a family argues about whether to make things formal.
Practical points
- Start with certified extracts, not accounts. Obtain the folio from the Land Registry and the power of attorney's registration record from the Registrar General; they establish what instrument was used and whether it was alive.
- Date everything. The execution date of the power, its registration or non-registration, the five-year point under section 3C and the 25 October 2024 cut-off decide much of the case before any evidence about intentions is heard.
- Ask what the attestation says. A section 3B statement that the power was unrevoked, or its absence, is a documented fact and a line of attack.
- Move to make the dispute visible on the register early, before the land is sold on to someone who can say they knew nothing.
- If an attorney is still in office, use the immediate revocation notice and diarise the three months for the formal instrument.
- Run any criminal complaint alongside the civil action, not instead of it. Only the civil proceedings restore the title.
The formalities that a validly executed power must satisfy in the first place, and the traps for instruments signed overseas, are set out in signing documents abroad for use in Sri Lanka.
Land is easier to protect before you leave than to recover afterwards. What else is worth settling first, and what can still be done from abroad, is in your Sri Lankan legal loose ends.
