'CJ's wife not authorized to receive P34-million payment for property'

MANILA, Philippines - The prosecution panel yesterday said that the wife of Chief Justice Renato Corona was not authorized to receive P34 million in proceeds from the sale of a property owned by her relatives to the Manila City government.

Marikina City Rep. Romero Quimbo, spokesman for the prosecution, doubted the explanation of defense lawyers that Corona got a P34-million windfall because the Manila government expropriated the property owned by the Basa-Guidote Enterprises Inc. (BGEI) a family corporation of his wife Cristina in 2001.

Philippine Savings Bank officials earlier told the Senate impeachment court that Corona had P36.7 million in time deposits under three accounts, which he withdrew and closed on Dec. 12, the day he was impeached by 188 congressmen.

Defense lawyers, however, said their client had to close the accounts because the money was not his but belonged to his wife’s corporation.

Quimbo said that based on the testimony of former Manila mayor Lito Atienza before the Senate impeachment court, the 1,020-square meter property near Malacañang was not expropriated but sold. Corona’s lawyers said Cristina was authorized by the BGEI to act as their agent.

“It was not an expropriation by the admission of their (defense) own witness, it was a negotiated sale. It was a negotiated sale and there were a number of questionable or irregularities that attend, those irregularities are observed by the Commission on Audit (COA),” Quimbo said.

He said the special power of attorney (SPA) used by Cristina at the time of the negotiations with Atienza was already 21 years old.

“It (SPA) was issued in her favor to negotiate, to sell, convey insofar as the property is concerned. But it did not authorize her to receive proceeds of the sale. (But) there was a provision giving her a five percent commission for the sale,” Quimbo said.

“On the basis of the COA observations, they said that it was incumbent upon the City of Manila, before it actually paid out P34 million, (that) they should have made sure that the SPA in favor of Mrs. Corona was in fact updated,” he said.

What was significant, according to Quimbo, is that Cristina was negotiating with the Manila city government as an administrator of the BGEI, which should have caught the attention of officials.

“To say that there was an administrator for a property, that means there is an ongoing conflict, dispute or there is a transition. So she was both an agent as well as an administrator. Those are two conflicting roles that she was taking. An administrator is placed to be able to take care of a property on behalf of several owners who are probably in dispute or have not resolved how it is to be distributed,” the lawmaker said.

Quimbo said an administrator is supposed to protect the interest of the stakeholders while an agent “is somebody who actually participates (in the sale) because you will profit from it.”

He earlier said that Corona’s lawyers would have a hard time disproving allegations that the Chief Justice’s multimillion-peso bank deposits are not his but that of BGEI’s.

Quimbo said the chief magistrate “was using the proceeds of the expropriation as a mere excuse to justify the source of the huge amount of money stashed in his secret bank accounts that he did not disclose in his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN).”