Blunders not plunder

The recent case of “Plunder” filed against Supreme Court Justice Lucas Bersamin, Businessmen Bobby Ongpin and Ramon Ang, as well as officers of the Land Bank of the Philippines, and San Miguel Corporation may be a spin off or a related matter to the land reform dispute that the complainant’s family lost in the Supreme Court.

As it turns out, complainant Emilio Aguinaldo Suntay III is actually just the “second generation” in terms of taking the Landbank to court. Emilio’s grandfather or grand uncle had originally tangled with the Landbank beginning in 1972. Back then Federico Suntay owned 3,682 hectares of land in Sablayan, Occidental Mindoro which was subjected to land reform. The government took away 948 hectares and the Landbank and the DAR offered to pay F. Suntay P4,497.50 per hectare or a total of P4,251,141.

F. Suntay rejected the offer and demanded just compensation through the Regional Agrarian Reform Adjudicator (RARAD) Region IV where the case was assigned to RARAD Conchita Minas. Thirty-nine years after, on January 24, 2001 Minas declared that the just compensation for F. Suntay should be P157,541,951. Landbank filed a motion for reconsideration but was denied by Minas. Landbank then went to the Regional Trial Court Branch 46 on April 20/01 for a Judicial determination of Just Compensation. In the mean time RARAD Minas ordered Sheriffs to execute her judgment and get Landbank to pay F. Suntay the money.

What followed then can only be described as multiple cases of people not knowing what their powers are and where it stops. It also opens up a can of worms as to how fundamental mistakes can multiply into major legal and financial disasters. Between 2001 and 2008 various counter suits and legal maneuvers took place resulting in F. Suntay, through his appointee Josefina Lubrica, managing to keep one step ahead and succeeding to get Minas and Sheriffs of the RARAD to hold a public auction of Landbank’s shares in PLDT, Meralco, and First Gen Corporation. In those auctions Lubrica was always the lone bidder and highest bidder. By November 2008, Lubrica successfully got Meralco to transfer the stocks of Landbank to Lubrica’s name.

In the middle of all that, offices within the DAR where quarreling over jurisdiction, authority, and point of law. The RTC Branch 46 made decisions based on arguments presented but failed to appreciate or realize it’s primary role in the legal conflict. The Court of Appeals got stuck on technicalities and lost sight of the more important matter of which laws applied and what the spirit of the law intended as well as its responsibility to protect public interest.

But as they say; “the long arm of the law” always manages to catch up. All the legal arguments went through the RTC, the Court of Appeals and finally with the Supreme Court specifically Justice Lucas Bersamin and his associates who ripped through all the issues raised during the almost 40 year legal battle. The SC decided that, it is the RTC’s sole responsibility to decide on Just Compensation and not the RARAD. The action of auctioning the various shares of the LandBank was effectively illegal since the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) states that the money should come from the Agrarian Reform Fund not assets of the LandBank and only after the property owner has surrendered all titles and property to DAR or LandBank.

Justice Bersamin and associates even corrected the Court of Appeals on several points of the law pertaining to what was moot and academic, and eventually reversed all the gains that Federico Suntay would have won by ordering the RTC in Mindoro to settle the question of Just Compensation.

From what I can “guess”, during this time, someone from the Suntay group as well as government must have tried to initiate a sale of the Meralco shares for different reasons. To begin with it was a period of economic distress where share values were not very strong and several fund managers had already been burned while others were trying to unload. The complicated legal battle was also proving to be costly for parties concerned and neither side could not boldly predict victory. On the other hand, the prospective buyers were clearly not going to jump into the pond without an exit strategy if the seller lost the case. Finally, I venture that the buyers opted to work with the LandBank officials because they were government, as well as the presumption that the group relied on the long experience of Attorney Estelito Mendoza’s mastery of the law. This could somehow explain why the same cast of characters are now the respondents to the plunder case.

Moving forward to 2012, one look at the official statement of the LandBank of the Philippines regarding the plunder case and quiet a number of questions will immediately be answered. Perhaps the most important being: why was there no public bidding of the Meralco Shares? Apparently, the Meralco Shares are “Trading assets which can be traded in the regular course of its business”. Come to think of it, it would certainly be difficult if not odd if such “shares” were sold only through bidding because shares are traded through the Stock Exchange and value is determined by market confidence and not lowest or highest bids. At the time that the shares were allegedly “sold” the market or share price was around P57/ share while the purchase offer was P90. The claim of disadvantage to the government does not hold water since todays price is in the realm of yesterday’s future. In 2008, the Philippines was not the new Tiger economy it is today.

But over and above all the technicalities, according to the official statement is that: “the transaction did not materialize due to the unlawful cancellation by Adjudicator Minas (Conchita) of LANDBANKS’s share in Meralco. The Shares Purchase Agreement therefore was not at all implemented in 2008 and even now”.

In the end, there is reason to believe that it’s a case of Plunder VS Plunder, where bank officials have been targeted because the LandBank filed a Plunder and Corruption charge in March 18, 2009 against RARAD Minas, Lubrica and other parties.

So why were Ongpin, Ang and SMC included? Politics, Pedro. Politics! Some people want to get back inside Meralco, one way or another and it is not Ongpin or Ang.

From what I heard, after Manny Pangilinan took control of Meralco, some people were asked to leave. Ever since that day, things have never been the same for a particular family, which has been split due to the “wrong” choice of partners.