SC rejects second appeal of ruling on election automation deal

The Supreme Court (SC) has thrown out another motion for reconsideration filed by the Mega Pacific Consortium (MPC) seeking to reverse the tribunal’s earlier decision to stop the automation project of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) for the May polls.

In a one-page resolution dated March 30, the SC en banc resolved to deny, for lack of merit, the second motion for reconsideration, dated March 5, filed by the counsels of MPC and Mega Pacific eSolutions Inc.

"No further pleadings will be entertained," the SC said, saying it "is a prohibited pleading" under Rule 52 Section 2 in relation to Rule 56 Section 4 of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure as amended.

In February, the SC already denied with finality the appeals filed by MPC and the Comelec on its Jan. 13 decision nullifying their P1.3 billion contract for the supply of automated counting machines.

The SC en banc said the Comelec and the MPC merely raised the same procedural and substantive issues in their first separate motions for reconsideration.

The SC had earlier ruled the contract between Comelec and MPC should be junked due to major flaws in the bidding process and failure to meet technical requirements.

The SC said all the issues surrounding the contract were "exhaustively discussed and definitively passed upon" in its Jan. 13 decision.

The court said it voided the contract between the Comelec and the MPC "for having been made and executed with inexplicable haste, in grave abuse of discretion and in clear violation not only of law and settled jurisprudence but also the bidding rules and requirements of the poll body itself."

"All of these grounds are already adequately explained in the decision and, thus, need not be repeated or elaborated on," the SC said.

The court further said the MPC’s request for a new hearing had no merit, saying it had given the parties more than sufficient opportunity to explain their causes through kilometric pleadings and exhaustive presentations during the oral argument.

With its decision, the SC effectively ordered a re-bidding and a repeat of the whole process of awarding the project as it asked the Comelec to refrain from implementing any other contract or agreement regarding the automated election project.

The court granted the petition of the Information Technology Foundation of the Philippines, which assailed the Comelec for awarding the contract to a consortium that was not yet in existence at the time of bidding and despite several technical lapses of the project.