Manotoks fighting two land battles

AS I SEE IT
Manotoks fighting two land battles
By Neal Cruz
Inquirer
Last updated 00:16am (Mla time) 11/16/2007

Most Read

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=101192

Now I am ready to believe that the Batasan blast was caused by methane gas.

Why? Because of three things:

1. Methane is produced by rotting garbage. The Batasan is full of dirt and trash, di ba?

2. Methane is produced by shit, and members of the Batasan are full of shit.

3. Methane is produced in a septic tank. The Batasan is one big septic tank.

* * *

Congressmen can now say they earned the “cash gifts” (translation: bribes) distributed in Malacañang.

Malacañang can say the “distribution” was worth it.

* * *

The Manotok family is fighting land battles on two fronts: in the case involving the Maysilo Estate in Malabon-Caloocan-Valenzuela-Quezon City; and in the case involving the Manotok-Barque in Matandang Balara, Quezon City. Being prime property, the two land areas are worth billions of pesos. The portion of Maysilo Estate being contested is 300 hectares; the Matandang Balara property, beside the Ayala Heights subdivision and the Capitol Golf Course, is 34 hectares.

The Supreme Court has already ruled on the two cases — against the Manotoks. But the family has successfully made the tribunal reopen the cases. The final Supreme Court decision will have a big impact on the country’s Torrens titling system.

The Manotoks have sent me two letters explaining their side on the cases after I devoted two columns on them. This is their version of the cases:

The Maysilo Estate case — More than 300 hectares of the 1,660-hectare estate are being claimed by Jose B. Dimson, a lawyer who filed his claim several years ago. Dimson says that Original Certificate of Title (OCT) 994, the mother title of 25 percent of the property he is claiming, (the bigger portion is being claimed by the so-called Rivera heirs of Maria de la Concepcion Vidal) was issued on April 19, 1917. On the other hand, the Manotoks and Aranetas have OCT 994 dated May 3, 1917. The Supreme Court has ruled that since the Rivera title antedates that of the Manotok-Araneta title, then the earlier title is superior.

The Land Registration Authority (LRA), however, has said the Dimson OCT is spurious, that it is non-existent and that it could have been “an elaborate scam perpetrated at the Caloocan City Register of Deeds.” The register of deeds, lawyer Yolanda Alfonso, and her deputy, Norberto Vasquez Jr., admitted during a Senate investigation that they changed the date of the Rivera title to April 19, 1917 for unexplained reasons, for which reason both of them have been charged criminally.

Testimonies in previous court cases also established that Vidal was only 9 years old when Decree 36455 over the land was issued on Dec. 3, 1912, while her supposed grandson, Bartolome Rivera, was already 65 years old when he testified in a Pasig court in 1963. “This is a fantastic case of the grandson being older than the grandmother,” said a report of the Land Registration Commission (now the LRA) in 1981.

Bartolome was the only surviving son of Severo Rivera, a son of Vidal who died in 1907. The mother was only 4 years old when she gave birth to Severo!

* * *

The other case, Manotok vs Barque, also concerns two conflicting certificates of titles to 34 hectares of prime land in Quezon City, known as the Manotok Compound. The Monotoks, who actually live on the property, claim that they acquired the land from the government in 1920. The other title is held by the heirs of Homer Barque who is said to have bought the land in 1975.

After the 1988 fire that destroyed the Quezon City Register of Deeds records, the Manotoks applied for reconstitution and obtained the reconstituted title in 1991. The Barques applied for reconstitution of their own title in 1996. This started the case that is now with the Supreme Court en banc.

The LRA ordered the reconstitution of the Barque title. The Manotoks appealed to the Court of Appeals who sustained the LRA and ordered the cancellation of the Manotok title. The Manotoks went to the Supreme Court, raising a number of issues:

1. Whether the LRA has jurisdiction to rule on the validity of the Manotok title.

2. Whether the Court of Appeals may assume jurisdiction over the cases.

3. Whether the Court of Appeals may order the cancellation of the Manotok title and the reconstitution of the Barque title.

In a majority decision penned by Justice Consuelo Ynares-Santiago, the Supreme Court’s First Division:

1. Upheld the LRA decision declaring the Barque title as genuine (based on the owner’s duplicate certificate of title) and the Manotok title as spurious. It added that the LRA has jurisdiction to act on petitions for administrative reconstitution. Logically, the Court said, the LRA can declare a title sham or valid on its face.

2. Ruled that the Court of Appeals properly exercised its appellate jurisdiction over the judgment of the LRA. “No useful purpose will be served if the determination of an issue is remanded to the trial court only to have its decision raised again to the Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court,” it said.

3. Said that the Manotoks were not deprived of “their property” without due process when the Court of Appeals ordered the cancellation of their title even without a direct proceeding in the Regional Trial Court. By opposing the petition for reconstitution and by submitting their reconstituted title, the Manotoks acquiesced to the authority of the reconstituting officer, the LRA, and the Court of Appeals, and recognized their authority to pass judgment on their title.

Although the Supreme Court decision has become final and executory, the Manotoks were able to have the Court en banc reopen the case. This is now the case that the Supreme Court has to resolve.

MAYSILO: LANDMARK DECISION

LANDMARK DECISON

By Adrian E. Cristobal

Manila Bulletin

IN the next few days, the Supreme Court will decide once and for all the Maysilo land dispute, which has been going on in the past 47 years. Affected are thousands of individuals who have been in peaceful possession of their property within the Maysilo estate, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, government lands (450 hectares) covering the Bonifacio Memorial Circle, portions of the North Expressway up to EDSA and McArthur Highway, private institutions such as the Manila Central University, De La Salle Araneta University, and University of the East, and private commercial establishments such as the Ever Grand Central, Araneta Square, Bonifacio Market, Eternal Garden Memorial Park, including 64 barangays in Caloocan.

Immediately affected are the Manotok family and the Araneta Institute of Agriculture, Inc., whose possession of the Maysilo property since the 1940s was challenged by Jose Dimson, a lawyer, in the 1960s. According to records, Dimson and his assignee, the CLT Development Corporation, in a series of legal actions, were able to get a favorable decision against the Manotok realty and ALA – until the case was elevated to the Supreme Court.

The Manotok family and ALA believe that a Supreme Court dismissal of the former Caloocan register of deeds, Yolanda Alfonso, for allowing the change of registration date of Maysilo Original Certificate of Title to make it appear that there were two titles, will determine the coming SC decision.

The Supreme Court rebuked Alfonso for “wreaking havoc on our land titling system.” Indeed, “havoc” has been with the titling system since this country’s commonwealth period.

Maysilo: “Mother of all land titling scandals”

AS I SEE IT
‘Mother of all land titling scandals’
By Neal Cruz
Inquirer
Last updated 10:53pm (Mla time) 09/11/2007
THE SUPREME COURT EN BANC HEARD oral arguments for and against claimants to large tracts of prime land spanning four Metro Manila cities: Quezon, Caloocan, Malabon and Valenzuela. The Court will have to decide which of two original certificates of titles (OCTs) dating back to 1917, both numbered 994, and from which hundreds of transfer certificates of titles have emanated is authentic. The decision will finally settle what the late Chief Justice and Senate President Marcelo Fernan described as “the mother of all land title scandals in the country.” With Fernan as chair, the Senate justice and human rights committee, together with the committee on urban planning and housing resettlement, investigated this Maysilo Estate case.

The scandal started in 1962 when Caloocan City registrar of deeds Yolanda Alfonso, together with assistant registrar of deeds Norberto Vazquez Jr., allowed the change of registration date of an original certificate of title (OCT) of Maysilo Estate, making it appear that there were two such titles to the same huge track of land spanning portions of the four cities and affecting hundreds of thousands of residents and businessmen from Sangandaan all the way to Monumento in Caloocan, up to Balintawak in Quezon City, including portions of the North Luzon Expressway and Araneta Subdivision in Malabon. Now, two OCTs— OCT 994 issued on April 19, 1917 and OCT 994 issued on May 3, 1917—cover the same parcel of land. Ironically, it was the Supreme Court itself that made the confusion worse by accepting, in a 1992 decision, the existence of two OCTs and ruling that the OCT dated April 19, 1917, being issued earlier than the OCT dated May 3, 1917 was the superior and valid title. Thus, the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) lost its huge compound in Caloocan under a three-decade-old TCT originating from OCT 994 of May 3, 1917, to a claimant whose title originated from OCT 994 dated April 1917. But a technical plotting by the Land Registration Authority (LRA) showed that the claimant’s “lot” was located more than 12,000 meters away from the MWSS property. This decision wreaked havoc on the country’s land titling system.

Then Justice Secretary Teofisto Guingona formed a fact-finding inter-agency committee chaired by Undersecretary Ricardo Nepomuceno Jr. The investigation found that OCT 994 dated April 19, 1917 was non-existent for being “a fabrication” by Alfonso and Vazquez who “acted maliciously, fraudulently and in bad faith” when they signed a TCT in the name of a person bearing a wrong date of registration.

The investigation report said Alfonso’s “acquiescence in the alteration of the date of registration of OCT 994 in the titles” of a person as well as her act of deliberately ignoring the legal safeguards, especially her failure to require the presentation of a subdivision plan duly approved by the LRA or by the Land Management Bureau, for the titles of the applicant, are sufficient basis to find her guilty of grave misconduct. President Joseph Estrada dismissed Alfonso and Vazquez for grave misconduct and dishonesty.

The dismissals were affirmed by the Supreme Court. Associate Justice Conchita Carpio Morales, who wrote the decision for the second division, stressed: “By failing to prevent the irregularity that she (Alfonso) had reason to suspect all along or to take immediate steps to rectify it, petitioner had tolerated the same and allowed it to wreak havoc on our land titling system. Sadly that condition continues to rear its ugly head today.”

This fabrication of OCT 994 dated April 19, 1917 has a bearing on the awarding by the Court of the vast Maysilo Estate to its rightful owners. The estate is being contested by claimants using the two OCTs: Manotok Realty and Real Estate Corp. and Araneta Institute of Agriculture Inc., which use OCT 994 dated May 3, 1917 as basis for their claim of ownership, and the heirs of Jose Dimson and his assignee, CLT Development Corp., who use OCT 994 dated April 19, 1917 as their legal basis.

An adverse decision based on the fake OCT would set a precedent that would endanger the rights of the rest of the country’s legitimate land title holders and the integrity of the country’s land titles.

The Manotoks and AIA have been in peaceful, continuous and legal possession of the Maysilo Estate since the 1940s. But some time in the 1960s, Dimson filed a case to claim ownership of the vast estate, using as basis the spurious OCT 994 dated April 19, 1917. Dimson was said to be a lawyer of Ma. Conception Vidal’s grandchild, Bernardino Rivera, and as payment for legal services rendered, the latter gave him a deed of conveyance of 25 percent of his share of the Maysilo Estate.

Then Pasig Judge Cecilia Muñoz Palma confirmed the conveyance but disallowed the actual awarding of property and title to Dimson in 1966 because his 25 percent share had already been properly adjudicated by Bernardino Rivera to his heirs and assignees. This meant there was no more available land to be given to Dimson.

In 1977, or 11 years later, Dimson moved to execute the deed of conveyance issued by the Pasig judge before a Caloocan court. Despite the irregularity and without the presentation of the original of OCT 994 and the subdivision plan approved by the LRA or the Bureau of Lands, Caloocan Judge Marcelino Sayo granted Dimson’s motion and issued in his favor TCT 15169 covering 500,000 sq m of Lot 25-A-2 of the Maysilo Estate. This lot is the property covered by the TCT of the AIA.

MAYSILO: Save the titling system

THE LONG VIEW
Save the titling system
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Inquirer
Last updated 01:04am (Mla time) 09/10/2007
MANILA, Philippines – You may recall that on Feb. 20, 2006, I wrote about a legal fight (“The value of a title”), just one of many cases in Caloocan where land-grabbing threatens to seriously undermine the credibility of the land titling system in our country. Property owners who acquired their properties in good faith, developed them, paid taxes on them, suddenly faced a claim by a lawyer that he, in fact, owned their properties.

That lawyer, Jose B. Dimson, claimed ownership of a very large property on the basis of a land title of doubtful authenticity but which, he claimed, predated the (up to that point) original title on which the subsequent titles of the property owners were based. Thus one claim affected dozens of properties. Despite evidence to invalidate that claim, Dimson’s case kept winning in the courts. Property owners doggedly fought the spurious claim. One such group is composed of the Araneta Institute of Agriculture, Manotok Realty, Inc., Sto. Niño Kapitbahay Association, Inc. and CLT Realty Corp.

The legal fight between the group I mentioned above, and the person claiming their land, has revealed some interesting details since I last wrote about it.

The lawyers of the claimant, Dimson, besides admitting he’d never actually possessed the lands he claimed, said he had never paid taxes on them either (which is a way of asserting responsible ownership). What’s more, Dimson’s own lawyers admitted their client had never been a lawyer at all. So how could he have obtained ownership of the properties he said he earned by way of lawyers’ fees?

Not to mention the impossibility of Dimson’s claims as to the person who transferred the land to him being entitled to do so. Dimson said he got his title to the land as attorney’s fees from a certain Bartolome Rivera. Rivera alleged in turn that he inherited his title as an heir of Ma. Concepcion Vidal. The courts, in the case of Republic v. Lilia Sevilla and Jose Seelin, held that “[t]hus, it is physically and genetically impossible for him [Bartolome Rivera] to be the grandson of Maria de la Concepcion Vidal.” The Land Registration Commission, in a report dated August 3, 1981, pointed out that “[i]f Bartolome Rivera was 65 years old in 1963 or thereabouts, he was born on or before 1898. If Maria de la Concepcion Vidal was 9 years old on or before December 3, 1912, she was born on or before 1903. Could a grandson be older than his grandmother?”

Not to mention Dimson basing his claim on a title that, he claimed, predated the title of the Araneta Institute of Agriculture group. He said his OCT was dated Apr. 19, 1917. Those whose lands he wanted to take away could only point to an OCT dated May 3, 1917. But when Dimson’s people were asked to produce their title, they could produce none. On the other hand, the aggrieved property owners demonstrated to the Supreme Court recently that only one OCT No. 994 existed: issued on May 3, 1917. No less than the Solicitor General then, Antonio Nachura, personally and formally presented to the Supreme Court en banc the original OCT No. 994 issued on May 3, 1917 (the original copy itself taken from the Land Registration Authority vault).

Reports of the Department of Justice and the Senate Fact-Finding Committee had also previously pointed out that Dimson’s (alleged) OCT was fraudulent. The Senate, upon investigating the matter, said Dimson’s so-called title was “a fabrication perpetrated by Mr. Norberto Vasquez, Jr., former Deputy Registrar of Deeds of Caloocan City” and by Atty. Yolanda Alfonso, Registrar of Deeds of Caloocan City, who “consented to the acquisition of the property by … her children adopting 19 April 1917 as the date of registration of OCT 994 knowing the same to be erroneous … is a clear case of dishonesty, malice and bad faith.” We know Alfonso did these things, because the Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal ordered by the Office of the President. The Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Court of Appeals.

The Department of Justice then issued a report stating that the two contested OCTs (Dimson’s fake and the one present property owners derived their titles from) were never actually presented to the Supreme Court. What the Supreme Court used as the basis for saying there were two OCT Nos. 994 were the certifications appearing on the faces of the TCTs submitted by the two sides: but in truth, only one OCT No. 994 existed, issued on May 3, 1917.

However, complicating matters is that the Supreme Court issued a decision in another case, which upheld a Court of Appeals decision that there were two OCTs and which then upheld Dimson’s as the original one. In a sense, the Supreme Court ended up trapped by the Court of Appeals’ refusal to take judicial notice of the findings of the Senate and Department of Justice. If a court, however, took these reports into evidence, it would shatter some of the previous assumptions made by the courts.

These details, and many more, are now before the Supreme Court. It has embarked on reviewing a decision by one of its own divisions. This review presents a last chance for it to reverse the court’s upholding of the Dimson fraud. With evidence aplenty to help rectify assumptions originally made by the courts, evidence gathered by the Senate and the Department of Justice, decades of lawful property owners being harassed and imperiled can come to an end.

The Supreme Court, acting as a whole, holds the preservation of the rule of law as it pertains to the ownership of land, in its hands. It can stem the tide of chaos in our titling system. Or it can open the floodgates to an epidemic of Dimson-style land-grabbing. A title can either mean something, or mean nothing: it can either be maintained by the rule of law or the law of the jungle.

MAYSILO: “Mother of all scams”

BREAKTIME
Mother of all scams
By Conrado Banal III
Inquirer
Last updated 06:03am (Mla time) 09/11/2007
MANILA, Philippines — Watch out!

Word is out that the Supreme Court en banc will soon come out with another ruling on the 50-year old controversy over the 1,600-hectare Maysilo estate.

In business, pundits are saying that with the booming real estate sector nowadays, everybody in the sector is on edge because of the cases — three cases all in all, actually.

Also monitoring the cases are some government offices and universities, not to mention large commercial outfits such as malls and markets.

Down here in my barangay, however, our hearts go out to the thousands upon thousands of families residing in Caloocan, Malabon, Valenzuela and Quezon City.

They, too, will likely be affected by the forthcoming Supreme Court ruling.

Sure, those three cases actually involve just 300 hectares of the Maysilo estate’s 1,600 hectares.

And, okay, those 300 hectares are already much larger than the entire Bonifacio Global City in Taguig.

Still, it is highly possible that the Supreme Court ruling on the 300-hectare case will spill over to the rest of the Maysilo estate straddling those four cities.

The estate covers some 450 hectares of government land, part of the North Luzon Expressway (NLEx), huge commercial areas, three big universities and some 64 barangays in Caloocan City alone.

Look, the area is roughly three times the size of the entire city of San Juan — with or without the ousted President Joseph Estrada.

No wonder, the government and the business sector see a certain threat from those cases. It’s a potentially explosive case. People can be driven out of their homes and offices. You know — lots of homeless!

The brouhaha really started in the l960s, when a lawyer named Jose Dimson claimed in court to have the mother title to the entire Maysilo estate.

He declared ownership over 25 percent of the estate, telling the courts that the supposed owners used the lot as “payment” to him for “legal services.” Over the years, a corporation called CLT Realty somehow got to assume the claim of Dimson.

Thus CLT Realty, as claimant to those 300 hectares, became party to those three cases.

Just who are the people behind CLT Realty may be an interesting topic for another piece one of these days.

Anyway, on the other side of those cases against CLT Realty are the Manotok group (in one case), the Araneta Institute of Agriculture (in another) and the Sto. Niflo Kapitbahayan Association (in yet another).

Because of those 450 hectares of government land in the Maysilo estate, the Republic of the Philippines is an “intervenor.”

***

In the 1960s, anyway, the court in Pasig (under Judge Cecilia Muñoz Palma) recognized the conveyance of that particular 25 percent of the Maysilo estate to Dimson.

Still, the court rejected his position that the area should be awarded to him.

Some 10 years later, Dimson went to another venue, this time in Caloocan — for the execution of the conveyance of that 25 percent.

The Caloocan court awarded Dimson some 50 hectares. This is why Dimson got a title to a 50-hectare property.

Unfortunately, the same property already had an owner, the Araneta Institute of Agriculture, which became the Araneta University, which in turn is now part of the De La Salle education system.

And then in another court — in Rizal, this time — Dimson got an award for “whatever remains” of the certain lots in the Maysilo estate.

One of those lots (Lot 26) happened to be owned by the Manotok group.

The same lot eventually found its way into the hands of CLT Realty, which is the company in those cases before the Supreme Court.

In 1993, both the Araneta school and the Manotok group got court orders to vacate their properties.

And what, pray tell, was the basis for the orders?

Well it seems that Dimson presented a title dated April 19, 1917.

By some stroke of luck, or something, that date was only a few days earlier than the title held by both Araneta and Manotok — which was May 3, 1917.

Now Dimson — and thus CLT Realty — also won the case before the Court of Appeals.

Upon review, the Supreme Court upheld the CA, saying it was bound to adopt the findings of the lower courts since it was not a “trier” of facts.

Even, boss, if there was something blatantly wrong with the supposed “facts” established in the lower courts?

In recent years, the Senate and the Department of Justice discovered something awfully wrong with the mother title presented by Dimson — i.e., the CLT Realty’s side.

And that is, well, the title was nothing but a fake! Yes, the one dated April 19, 1917!

So much so that the late Senator Marcelo Fernan once called the whole thing the “mother of all land scams.”

Even the Supreme Court recently ruled as much, when it affirmed the dismissal of the former registrar of deeds of Caloocan City, a certain Yolanda Alfonso.

In effect, the former registrar allowed the change in the registration date of the mother title of the “Maysilo” estate, thus making it appear that there were actually two valid titles.

The Supreme Court upheld the Land Registration Authority in declaring the Dimson-inspired title as a “fabrication.”

There — that’s the mother title for the claim of the Dimson-CLT Realty group. The Supreme Court already said it was … well, fake!

Last year, the Supreme Court en banc heard the oral arguments of both sides of the cases over those 300 hectares.

In that hearing, the solicitor general himself, Eduardo Nachura, produced the original title, registered with the LRA, dated May 3, 1917 (and not April 19, 1917).

That’s the multibillion-peso question now facing the Supreme Court.

The questionable “Heirs of Barque”

This article written by Mr. Amado Macasaet, justifiably questions the simple fact as to why did the Heirs of Barque only claim the land (owned, occupied, and in-possession of the Manotok Family for 85 years) 9 very long years after the original certificate of title (of the Manotoks) was burned in the Quezon City Hall fire in 1988?

It is also important to note that the reason as to why they are called “Heirs of Barque” is simply because the person whom the Heirs of Barque claim to own the land is Homer Barque (Sr.) who, while he was still alive, never even set foot on the property or never even claimed that the property was his. It is only the “Heirs of Homer Barque” who say that their father owned the property of the Manotoks. But why did Mr. Homer Barque never claim it was his when he was alive? Why did Mr. Homer Barque never set foot on the property while he was alive?

It is quite obvious that the “Heirs of Homer Barque” are taking advantage of Mr. Homer Barque being dead, most likely, if he were still alive, he would never claim the Manotok property which his “Heirs” are claiming. This is an obvious scam created with some outrageous “Heirs of Barque” story. The story of the “Heirs of Barque” just does not add-up. The story simply does not make sense. This could create other stories of other “Heir of this and heirs of that”.

Sitting on one’s rights

Obviously, the law punishing a person or denying his rights for sitting on them too long does not apply in land disputes. Otherwise, the Court of Appeals would have thrown out the petition for reconstitution of the alleged title of the heirs of Homer Barque over a 34-hectare property in Quezon City.

The heirs of Homer Barque, represented by Teresita Barque Hernandez, woke up to discover their title or rights over the land, long occupied and titled in the name of the Manotok family, nine years after the original certificate of title was burned in the Quezon City Hall fire in 1988.

The presumption is the heirs of Homer Barque knew all along that they are rich, having a property with a present estimated value of more than P5 billion. Why they decided to be less than rich when they are sitting on huge wealth is a question the Supreme Court did not give too much value to.

The heirs of Barque were sitting on their rights far too long and it took a fire in the register of deeds in Quezon City for them to ask for a reconstitution of the title the duplicate of which they claimed they have.

The argument of the Manotoks that the heirs of Homer Barque never set foot on the land was also ignored by the Land Registration Authority, Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court.

The tribunal ruled that the title of the Manotoks was sham and spurious.

By whose word? The Land Registration Commission which earlier supported the Manotoks but changed the decision in favor of the Barque. The thing happened in the Court of Appeals.

The RTC’s jurisdiction

None of these would have ever come to pass had the LRA, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court saw fit to comply with the inescapable necessity of a law that says that judicial reconstitution of titles is an exclusive and original function of the Regional Trial Court.

Even the Supreme Court did not find it necessary to remand the case to the RTC saying the process is time-consuming and unnecessary since the title of the Manotoks had been established to be sham and spurious.

The key question is who established these “facts”? The wrong agencies such as the land Registration Authority which was sustained by the Court of Appeals which in turn was affirmed by the Supreme Court.

The Manotoks filed a memorandum of reconsideration twice. The Supreme Court denied it twice.

Pending before the court for which orals were held on July 24 was the petition of the heirs of Homer Barque to order the register of deeds of Quezon City to transfer the titles of the Manotoks to the heirs of Barque.

I never commented on that beyond saying that the schedule for five oral arguments were postponed until the sixth was held on Tuesday, July 24.

Self-established facts

The allegation, affirmed by the Supreme Court, that the title of the Manotoks was sham and spurious, was “established” by the Land Registration Authority which, as earlier said, had initially considered the titles as genuine.

The LRA changed its mind. That forced the Manotoks to file an appeal to the Court of Appeals. From what I can understand, the appeal automatically elevated the question to a judicial reconstitution, not administrative in the hands of the LRA.

It is here that the Court of Appeals which also initially agreed that the Manotok title was genuine might have made the mistake of ignoring a law that judicial reconstitution is an original and exclusive function of the regional trial court. In which case, the CA should have remanded the case to the RTC.

A division in the Supreme Court made the same mistake by ruling that since the titles of the Manotoks have been established as sham and spurious, there was no need to remand the case to the regional trial court as required by law. That could be time-consuming and unnecessary, according to the decision of the majority in the division headed by Associate Justice Consuelo Ynares Santiago.

RTC should establish the facts

The alleged facts relied upon by the Supreme Court in ruling in favor of heirs of Homer Barque were not judicially established although the case is one of judicial reconstitution.

In which case, according to the law, the regional trial court has exclusive and original jurisdiction.

The RTC is the venue that should have established the facts by examining documents and hearing the testimonies of witnesses, not the LRA whose administrative function is to approve or deny a petition for reconsideration.

Therefore, the case having become one of judicial reconstitution, the LRA has lost jurisdiction over the dispute.

It would have been automatically assumed by the regional trial court if the LRA had said so. But it did not. Neither did the Court of Appeals. Neither did the Supreme Court.

The SC ruled that the titles of the Manotoks are sham and spurious as established by the LRA and affirmed by the Court of Appeals.

I would have kept my peace if the conclusion that the Manotok titles are sham and spurious was established by the Regional Trial Court as required by law.

Jurisprudence

The 38-page dissent of Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio complete with four pages of bibliography contends that the jurisprudence long established by the Supreme Court was inapplicable.

Justice Consuelo Ynares Santiago in ponecia declared that it is.

Whether it is or it is not, does not depart from the law that the regional trial court has original and exclusive jurisdiction over the case.

Which is saying that if the law had been observed, it would be easier to believe that the RTC had ruled that the jurisprudence is applicable or inapplicable.

Of course the Supreme Court can determine which jurisprudence is applicable and which is not.

But we would have had the comfort of knowing the regional trial determined which jurisprudence is applicable.

The comfort is drawn from the fact the law giving the regional trial court exclusive and original jurisdiction was not skipped. In which I personally would not mind if the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the heirs of Homer Barque, like it did, with finality.

It’s a case of dura lex sed lex which the LRA, the Court of Appeals completely closed their eyes to.

Manotoks, land grabbers?

After I wrote the first item on this case, a lawyer-friend called me up and told me that I got the facts all wrong. I then told him to write me a summary of what is right.

He never did. Instead, he told me that the Manotoks are the biggest land grabbers in Metro Manila. I countered that is subject to proof.

In the present case, who is the land grabber? Is it the Manotoks who have a Torrens title to the property which they have been occupying and paying taxes on since ‘1923 or the heirs of Homer Barque who woke up to discover their rights nine years after their alleged original copy of the title was lost in a fire in 1988?

They suddenly came up with a duplicate copy of the original which they wanted reconstituted.

If I were one of the heirs of Barque, I would have taken possession of the 34-hectare property long before the copy of the original title was burned. That would have given me oodles and oodles of money and saved me from the current sticky litigation.

That, to my lawyer friend, makes the Manotoks, the biggest land grabber in Metro Manila.

Email: amadomacasaet@yahoo.com