Davide ordered to answer graft charges

MANILA, Philippines - The Office of the Ombudsman has ordered two retired Supreme Court justices to answer graft charges filed by disgruntled private claimants to the 78-hectare property along Commonwealth Ave. in Quezon City being leased by the University of the Philippines to Ayala Land.

Former Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. and Associate Justice Ma. Alicia Austria–Martinez were told to submit counter–affidavits to the complaint of Jorge Chin and Renato Mallari accusing them of violating Republic Act 3019 (Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Law) for their Nov. 13, 2002 ruling that reversed an earlier final decision of the Court declaring the private claimants as real owners of the property.

In a two-page order signed by Acting Director Aleu Amante of the Ombudsman Preliminary Investigation and Adjudication Bureau (PIAB)-C, respondents were given 10 days to submitted their defense.

The PIAB required Davide and Martinez to answer the charges after “finding enough basis to proceed with the preliminary investigation of this case.”

In their complaint, Chin and Mallari alleged that the decision rendered by the two retired justices sitting at the former first division of the High Court has caused them undue injury.

The petitioners brought the case to the Ombudsman late last year after losing their bid to regain ownership of the land in the SC.

The SC had junked their petition, where Chief Justice Reynato Puno was among those named respondent being a member of the former first division of the Court that granted the property to UP, for lack of merit.

In their petition in April last year, Chin and Mallari asked the SC to annul its resolution that granted the land to UP.

The petitioners, whose ownership of the property was upheld in February 2000 but taken back in November 2003 by the same division of the High Court, decried what they described as “extrinsic fraud and grave injustice” in the revocation of their titles.

The petitioners argued that the 2003 resolution of the SC Special First Division should be declared void because the 2000 decision was already final and executory.

In its 2000 decision, justices of the SC division unanimously granted ownership of the contested land to petitioners, who bought their titles from the heirs of Antonio Pael, and junked the claim of Pedro Destura, who claimed he bought the property from a Pael family representative. But two years later, the SC granted the property to UP.

The turnaround happened when the SC remanded the case to the CA in December 2001 to resolve which title – that of the petitioners or that of the university – overlapped the property of the other.

The CA, in its July 2003 report to the SC, upheld the findings of the verification and relocation survey conducted by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) showing that properties under the title of UP (Transfer Certificate of Title 9462) overlapped the properties of Chin and Mallari (TCTs 52928 and 52929). It was also discovered that the titles of the petitioners were issued in 1938 while those of UP in 1949, or 11 years later.

But the SC division, according to petitioners, had “misapprehended” the findings of the DENR and CA and was misled by UP in ruling that the titles of Chin and Mallari overlapped those of the state university.

Lawyer Prospero Anave, representing the petitioners, said the SC “should not have reversed the CA report” because the High Court “is not a trier of facts.”

“Factual matters cannot be inquired into by the Supreme Court in an appeal for certiorari – the Court can no longer be tasked to go over the proofs presented by the parties and analyze, assess and weigh them to ascertain if the trial court and the appellate court were correct in according superior credit to this or that piece of evidence of one party or the other,” he said.

Anave argued that the High Court division relied solely on the interpretation of UP on the results of the DENR survey without taking into consideration the clarification issued by their reviewer, DENR assistant regional executive director for legal services Rogelio Tiongson, who said it was the property of UP that overlapped the property of petitioners.

In their petition seeking to reclaim the property, Chin and Mallari claimed that the Supreme Court was only misled when it awarded the land to UP in a resolution in November 2003.

A final verification survey report of DENR National Capital Region dated Jan. 16, 2003 showed that the contested property was a case of “overlapping.”