Former PCGG counsel to file motion for reconsideration

MANILA, Philippines - A former special counsel of the Presidential Commission on Good Government said that he appealed the Sandiganbayan’s ruling that rejected a former government lawyer’s move to have business tycoon Lucio Tan’s brother Mariano Tanenglian testify against him to supposedly prove that some of the corporations he owns actually belong to the Marcoses.

Catalino Generillo, former PCGG special counsel handling the government’s ill-gotten wealth case vs Tan, said that he was plodding on in fighting the ill-gotten wealth case despite moves of government lawyers to stop him from doing so. “I will file a motion for reconsideration, definitely,” Generillo told The Star in a phone interview.

Generillo also shrugged off questions on his legal personality in the case, saying the Supreme Court allows private citizens to pursue such cases with “transcendental importance” to public interests.

Generillo cited a doctrine of the Supreme Court raised when it ruled on an ill-gotten wealth case involving the PCGG previously filed by former Solicitor General Frank Chavez where the High Tribunal said that “the matter of recovering the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses is an issue of ‘transcendental importance to the public.”

“Ordinary taxpayers have a right to initiate and prosecute actions questioning the validity of acts or orders of government agencies or instrumentalities, if the issues raised are of ‘paramount public interest,’ and if they ‘immediately affect the social, economic and moral well being of the people,” the Supreme Court said in a previous decision, Generillo cited.

Forfeiture case

Generillo was one of the “special counsels” recruited by the late PCGG chairman Haydee Yorac to pursue several important ill-gotten wealth cases against the Marcoses and their cronies in view of the OSG’s previous neglect to pursue the cases supposedly due to a lack of lawyers.

Generillo’s ouster from the case came in the heels of his recent achievement of successfully coordinating with Tanenglian and getting him to agree to be a witness for the government.

Tan’s chief legal counsel Estelito Mendoza, earlier claimed that laws prohibit the hiring of private lawyers to litigate government cases, saying that OSG lawyers should be the ones to do so.

The PCGG had filed the forfeiture case on Tan asset’s on the strength of a public declaration of the widow of the late deposed president Ferdinand Marcos, former First Lady Imelda Marcos, that 60 percent of the tycoon’s companies were owned by her late husband.

Mrs. Marcos had submitted before the anti-graft court deeds of assignment signed by Marcos and Tan where the 60 percent secret ownership by Marcos of Tan’s Shareholdings, Inc., the holding company that holds control of the tycoon’s Fortune Tobacco, Asia Brewery, Foremost Farms and other companies, was laid out.