Muntinlupa RTC finds land titles irregular

MANILA, Philippines - The Regional Trial Court Branch 276 of Muntinlupa City presided by Judge Pedro M. Sabundayo Jr. has ruled that the Intercontinental Development Corp. (ICDC) was a buyer in bad faith due to anomalies and irregularities in acquiring a property covered by three separate titles.

The questioned property is covered by Transter Certificates of Titles (TCT) Nos. 111350, 111351, and 111352 with a total area of 1,740,551 square meters which includes the Susana Heights Subdivision where one of the toll exits of the South Luzon Expressway is named after. ICDC elevated the trial court decision to the Court of Appeals for review.

ICDC has admitted that its titles were derived from the root title Original Certificate of Title (OCT) No. 656. But no records of this OCT can be found in the Lands Management Bureau (LMB), said the court.

“If a title has any semblance of validity at all, its survey plan and approved technical descriptions must at least be extant in LMB’s records. There can be no valid title if it has no approved survey plan and technical descriptions in the LMB files,” the court said.

One of the distinguishing marks of the Torrens System is the absolute certainty of the identity of the registered land, the court said. But it found that OCT 656’s area, location and metes and bounds cannot be identified. ICDC’s own witness admitted this during his cross-examination.

“If a parcel of land contains no area, a registered owner or a buyer will not know the extent of his property for purposes of determining consideration or price, subdivision or partition, zonal or assessed value and so on. Neither can a surveyor compute the area of a parcel of land in a title if he has to get it from another source or from another title to a neighboring area. This is contrary to the Torrens System of land registration,” the court said.

The evidence also showed that ICDC’s TCT No. 111350 has an incomplete technical description and therefore is defective. Based on this defective technical description, the line’s point of ending does not go back to the point of beginning. “Under this situation, there is no way that the land’s area, configuration, boundary and with it the identity can be established,” the court said.

The court also found out that in subdividing TCT No. 111350 into 598 daughter titles, ICDC used another cancelled title and no record of a subdivision plan was found.