How Safe Are Our Land Titles?

In three words, are you kidding? That document you are keeping in a bank vault called a Transfer Certificate of Title or Original Certificate of Title may have been superseded by a fake version that had been accepted for registration by your local Register of Deeds. Given our current primitive method for keeping tabs of land titles, and the corruption in our courts and registers of deeds, our current Torrens Title system is almost a joke.

This is a serious disincentive to investment in this country, local or foreign. I have been hearing a number of sob stories about well-entrenched criminal syndicates using fake titles to dispossess legitimate landowners. This is why the modernization of our land title record keeping should be a priority of this government. Too bad, the move to computerize our land registration records, to make it available on line in real time, is mired in legal controversies.

The Special Reports Group of ABS-CBN News is working on one big case involving extensive land holdings of a former Quezon City councilor who was a known Marcos crony. Of course, his holdings were sequestered by the PCGG during the Cory Aquino administration. It is still supposed to be sequestered up to today but the former councilor was surprised to find out it was mortgaged to Asian Bank and the bank has foreclosed on the mortgage.

How could anyone mortgage a sequestered property (actually, the title was also transferred twice to the same group of persons) with the mortgage legally annotated by the Register of Deeds? Why did Asian Bank, a bank managed by Tita Cory's former Finance Secretary, accept that kind of mortgage?

I am sure there will be one hell of a long court battle arising from this case. But one can't help being amazed at the audacity of the people involved to even try such a scam. If we had a better land registration system, this would not have been possible.

I understand there is a P4-billion build-operate-own proposal to establish an information technology infrastructure to provide a seamless information access, transfer and exchange among and between the LRA central office, its 15 regional registries of deeds and 157 registry of deeds nationwide. A question on the conduct of the bidding for the system threatens to delay the implementation of the project.

This is something that should be implemented right away. The administration should quickly resolve the issue because the longer our land registration system stays as is, the longer we will have to suffer the fraud perpetuated by criminal syndicates.

The earlier we clean up the system, the better it will be for investors and ordinary landowners alike. No sense allowing foreign investors to own land through Erap's Concord proposal if the land registration system can't be trusted. That would give no incentive to investors, gaining us nothing after all the acrimonious debates.

And yes, before you pay for a land purchase, double check that title.

When Erap said he was elated that his rating has gone up to plus 28 from plus five, I simply shrugged my shoulders and told myself the President just didn't know any better. These opinion polls could be very technical and it is easy to lose the nuances that make a difference in interpretation.

But when Palace officials who should know better start saying the same thing, then the line must be drawn. There is obviously a concerted effort to obfuscate, if only to try to present the administration's predicament as less serious than it really is.

In the first place, the SWS survey and the Pulse Asia survey cannot be compared with each other. In the first place, one deals with net satisfaction rating and the other with net approval. They may seem fairly the same to the layman but they aren't. Also, the surveys have different time frames. And the questions asked were differently framed.

So it is not right to say that the President's approval rating went up from plus five to plus 28 in a matter of weeks. The plus 28 figure of Pulse Asia should be compared with the plus 44 rating of the President in the previous survey of Pulse Asia. In other words, the President went down 21 points in the Pulse Asia survey; he did not go up 23 points from the plus five of SWS.

Palace officials should have resisted the temptation to obfuscate this one because any attempt is so cheap and easily refuted. The more important thing is the President has acknowledged his problem and is doing something about it.

Sometimes it is not easy to kick the habit of being petty. I thought that when the President returned administrative supervision of the SEC from the Palace to the Department of Finance, he acknowledged the negative reaction of the investing public to his attempt to muzzle and control SEC Chairman Yasay on the BW Resources scandal. Now it seems the President is unrepentant and would risk the independent reputation of the SEC to help a major campaign contributor.

Now that the public knows the score, it is best the President drop any attempt to force Chairman Yasay to resign. The reason our laws gave the SEC Chairman a term of office is precisely to protect his independence. Kung ganyan lang kadali palitan ang Chairman, who is going to respect the SEC?

Investor confidence in an independent SEC is important for investors. Any investor in local corporations want to be reasonably assured that there is a level playing field in terms of our legal framework and the administrative mechanism to see this through.

As we have seen in the BW scandal, many investors may have lost a great deal of money through the manipulations of a few in the know. The country's equities market will not fully develop under such conditions. The President's friends should not get special treatment from the SEC. If Jun Yasay is punished for trying to go to the bottom of the BW case, the SEC will lose credibility to the detriment of our investment climate.

Ernie Espiritu has something on agri business today.

A woman walks into an accountant's office and tells him that she needs to file her taxes. The accountant says, "Before we begin, I'll need to ask a few questions." He gets her name, address, social security number, etc. and then asks, "What is your occupation?"

The woman replies, "I'm a whore."

The accountant balks and says, "No, no, no. That will never work. That is much too crass. Let's try to rephrase that."

The woman says, "OK, I'm a prostitute."

"No, that is still too crude. Try again."

They both think for a minute, then the woman says, "I'm a chicken farmer."

The accountant asks, "What does chicken farming have to do with being a whore or a prostitute?"

"Well, I raised over 5,000 cocks last year!"

(Boo Chanco's e-mail address is [email protected])