The Story of The “Heirs of Homer Barque”

Here is the consolidated article in the “Overnight Billionaire” series by Mr. Victor Agustin written as:

Overnight Billionaire

Overnight Billionaire 2

Overnight Billionaire 3

It does not need a Sherlock Holmes, Pink Panther or a regular person to understand what the “Heirs of Homer Barque” are upto. Ms. Teresita Barque-Hernandez has a small real-estate company and all of a sudden just woke up and realized that her father owned a multi-billion piece of property. But Mr. Homer Barque, now deceased, never told anyone that he owned the property and he never even entered the property. Most likely, Mr. Homer Barque has not even seen the property which his “Heirs” claim to be his.

Enjoy these articles:

Overnight Billionaire
By Victor Agustin
Inquirer
Last updated 00:49am (Mla time) 07/21/2006

Published on Page B5 of the July 21, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

THE Supreme Court has made a litigant an overnight billionaire, and Justice Antonio Carpio is wincing from his colleagues’ decision.

The case involves a 34-hectare piece of property right behind the Ayala Heights subdivision in Quezon City, whose title, in the name of the long-time settlers, the Manotoks, was effectively invalidated in favor of a new claimant.

The new claimant, a certain Teresita Barque-Hernandez, said to be a daughter of the late Homer L. Barque, surfaced in 1996, claiming that their copy of the land title had been destroyed in the City Hall fire of 1988.

The long and the short of it is that, last December, the Supreme Court’s First Division, then chaired by outgoing Chief Justice Hilario Davide, not only upheld the reconstitution of the Barque title but also cancelled the Manotok title.

The First Division also modified the Land Registration Authority (LRA) decision that it is up to the Regional Trial Court, as the LRA had wanted, to determine the actual ownership of a disputed property, as had been spelled out in Presidential Decree 1529, the Property Registration Decree.

Ironically, the high court’s decision also effectively set aside the factual basis of a 1984 decision by the same First Division, then chaired by Chief Justice Claudio Teehankee, affecting the same 34-hectare property.

The 1984 case, involving a spurned tenancy claim, referred to the findings of the Court of Agrarian Relations that the Balara property was donated by Severino Manotok in 1946 to his eight children and two grandchildren.

The 1984 decision even noted that the Manotok heirs in 1950 used the property as their capital contribution to form the still-existing Manotok Realty Inc.

The Manotok heirs include Rosita Go, the wife of banker Edward Go, and the family of retired general Mamerto Bocanegra, who lives in the sprawling compound.

Nothing is known about Barque-Hernandez, except that she uses a No. 9 Pluto St., Greenland Village, Rosario, Pasig City, address, and that her counsel is also Joseph Estrada’s counsel, former fiscal Jose Flaminiano.

According to court records, the late Barque not only had a duplicate Transfer Certificate of Title but also real estate tax receipts and tax declarations. Five years of accumulated real estate taxes were allegedly paid in one lump sum, shortly before filing the 1996 claim.

It is not immediately clear why, since 1946, when the Manotok patriarch transferred the Balara land title to his heirs, Barque or his representative(s) never attempted to take legal or physical possession of any portion of the 34-hectare rolling land, and did it only in 1996.

In his dissenting opinion, which incidentally is longer than the opinion of decision author Justice Consuelo Ynares-Santiago, Carpio noted not only the flip-flopping findings of the LRA but also the Court of Appeals, having reversed itself in invalidating the Manotok title.

Carpio’s position is that, although the LRA may reconstitute the land title, ownership of the disputed property must still be determined in a full-blown trial before the Regional Trial Court, and not the appellate court and now the Supreme Court assuming “equity distribution” over the case, “when the law,” Carpio added, “has not granted such jurisdiction.”

But the First Division is steadfast in its ruling, saying it would be “needlessly circuitous” to remand the case to the Regional Trial Court after the LRA and two Court of Appeals divisions had already ruled the Manotok title as invalid.

“Basic is the rule that factual findings of agencies exercising quasi-judicial functions are accorded not only respect but even finality, aside from the consideration that this court is essentially not a trier of facts,” said the First Division, as it again denied a renewed appeal from the Manotoks to bring the case for review by the entire Supreme Court.

“Without such authority, the LRA would be a mere robotic agency clothed only with mechanical powers.” To stop their ejectment, the Manotoks have filed an adverse claim with the LRA and Register of Deeds, although it is not clear if that can stop the writ of possession that Barque-Hernandez had already reportedly obtained.

Almost one and a half times the size of the University of Santo Tomas campus, the contested property, at a conservative estimate of P5,000 a square meter, is easily worth P1.7 billion. Except for the dozen houses built by the Manotok heirs, the property remains a “rolling, forestall land,” hardly changed since 1912, when the Manotok patriarch was said to have first laid claim on the land.

Overnight Billionaire 2

By Victor Agustin

Inquirer
Last updated 05:59am (Mla time) 07/24/2006

Published on page B2 of the July 24, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

IT IS BEGINNING TO LOOK LIKE mischievous spirits have run circles around the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, causing the learned justices to award the 34-hectare Manotok compound behind Ayala Heights, Quezon City, to an unknown claimant.

Read Cocktales, July 21, 2006, for background and then consider these:

A realtor-wife of a Caloocan City Regional Trial Court judge had been selling lots and bringing prospective buyers to the P1.7-billion compound even while the case was still being heard by the Court of Appeals.

The realtor-wife and the judge happen to be neighbors of the “overnight billionaire,” Teresita Barque-Hernandez, of 9 Pluto St., Greenland Village, Rosario, Pasig City.

The Greenland Village house that Barque-Hernandez uses is not registered in her name–a detective agency found out that she is merely renting the property–despite her claim to the 34-hectare property and presumably other inheritance.

A check with the Bureau of Internal Revenue showed no tax account number has been issued to Barque-Hernandez. No employment history or business affiliation is known about her, except that she is being represented by Erap counsel, former Fiscal Jose Flaminiano.

The Register of Deeds of Quezon City who had initially resisted issuing duplicate papers to support the Barque-Hernandez claim was transferred to Cebu under duress.

The administrator of the Land Registration Authority, Reynaldo Maulit, under whose tenure the Manotok title was cancelled, is now the lawyer of another private individual who had obtained a title to and is now claiming the 30-hectare Los Baños compound of the Department of Science and Technology.

And, in a sign of–to be polite about it–judicial inadvertence, both the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court’s First Division were unaware that the ownership of the same 34-hectare property had already been upheld in favor of the Manotok family by the Supreme Court way back in July 1984 under GR L-62626.

The Manotok lawyer who appeared in and won that 1984 case is now a Supreme Court justice, Romeo Callejo Sr. Callejo was with the Second Division and apparently was not consulted on the case when the First Division handed down the controversial ruling shortly before last Christmas.

Just last month, a certain lawyer Lito Abrogar, allegedly with Ayala Land, e-mailed a proposal to banker Edward Go, claiming that a client of his, not Barque-Hernandez, owns the 34-hectare compound and offered P35 million to the Manotoks to ally against Barque-Hernandez.

In return, the Manotoks would give up their claim to their property in favor of the Abrogar client, and would be allowed to continue living in the property for the duration of the court case, this time against Barque-Hernandez.

(Correction: The first name of banker Edward Go’s wife, another Manotok heiress, is Pacita, not Rosita, as had been reported in Friday’s column.)

Overnight billionaire 3

By Victor Agustin
Inquirer
Last updated 00:07am (Mla time) 07/31/2006
ERAP counsel Jose Flaminiano furnished some biographical data on his “overnight billionaire” client, whose claim on the 34-hectare Manotok compound in Diliman has been upheld by the Supreme Court.

According to Flaminiano, the lucky litigant, Teresita Barque-Hernandez, is a retired teacher who owns the Pasig house that she lives in, contrary to information furnished to Cocktales in previous columns.

In 2003, Barque-Hernandez put in P62,500 as paid-up capital to form a real estate company for the urban poor, with proper SEC and BIR papers to boot.

Flaminiano also traced the provenance of Barque-Hernandez–Cocktales has several photos of the alleged Barque-Hernandez bungalow, showing its rusted roof and makeshift garage–but, unfortunately, the learned counsel failed to answer the most crucial question of all: When and how much did his client acquire the multibillion-peso, 34-hectare property?

Caveat Emptor – Buying real estate in Quezon City

Just recently, it has come-out in the open that OFW’s are being victimized not only by Ponzi Schemes or Scams like the recent FrancSwiss scam… but also, they are being scammed by unscrupulous Real Estate Brokers that sell non-existent real estate or condominiums to these innocent Overseas Filipino Workers. This is now called the “Housing Scam”. You can also read this about OFW’s being victimized and also this more recent warning to OFW’s.

It is heard-thru-the-grapevine that a lot of these unscrupulous Real Estate Brokers that want to make a quick-buck, are selling properties in Quezon City that are not for sale or are not owned by the seller. Some even sell lots in Quezon City at very-low “pre-development” prices so that the would-be victim would buy right away.

Why are they selling properties in Quezon City? They are selling properties in Quezon City simply because of the proliferation of fake “reconsituted” titles that were caused by the anomalous fire that destroyed land titles in the City Hall of Quezon City in 1988. Without this fire, the land scam syndicate would not have been able to steal properties or do their dirty land-grabbing from honest land-owners.

The usual modus operandi of these scammers:

1. They would have bogus brochures and pictures whether printed or using a website like FrancSwiss.
2. If the scammer is big-time and wants to scam big-time investors, the scammer usually rents a helicopter and does a “fly-over” on the property and points his finger saying “that is the property for sales”. But please note that the scammer does not even own the property.
3. Scammers would even rent trucks, bull-dozers or whatever machinery as “props” to show the would-be victim that the property is undergoing “pre-development”.
4. Some scammers who have contacts with the “show biz” industry would even ask some show-biz talents to “endorse” these bogus properties.
5. It is easy for these scammers to victimize OFW’s in another country since these OFW’s have not set foot on the property and can only view the property from a brochure or bogus land title.
6. The more sophisticated scammers that are armed with laptops now even use Google Earth to show the approximate location of the property to add some bogus credibility.

How do you protect yourself from these Real Estate Scams, Housing Scams, Land Scams, Land-grabbers,… or simply criminals?

1. Make sure you do your “due diligence” or investigate the history of the property and check if the seller of the property really owns the property.
2. It would help if the property for sale is being advertised that it is “For Sale” to the public. If the scammer tells you that it is for sale, you have to make sure that it is really for sale.
3. Do not buy a property if you have not set foot inside the property.
4. Do not buy a property that is under “contestation”.
5. Do not buy a property without checking the Land Titles first and go to the appropriate government agencies to do your research.
6. To see is to believe — don’t believe these colorful brochures or websites especially if the developer is not a well-known or credible developer.
7. Check with the SEC if the “developer” or “company selling the property” is registered to sell properties and if the properties are really under their name.
8. Scammers are very good at the “business of scamming” and therefore you never know you are being scammed (like the victims of FrancSwiss and PIPC), until it is too late.
9. Consult your lawyer, if you do not have one, … get a friend who has one.

Like the victims of FrancSwiss and now the more recent Performance Investment Products Corp or PIPC scam, the usual victims are those that do not do their own research, due diligence or even seek “lawyerly-advise”. And so, if a property is “too cheap”… buyer beware. If it is too good to be true, … it usually is.

Hmmm…. is it possible that some scamming real estate brokers have sold portions of the Manotok’s property even though the Manotok family are not selling the property?

Is it possible that these scamming real estate brokers that are “friends” with the “Heirs of Barque” have sold portions of the Manotok property to some innocent OFW’s abroad? Maybe selling portions of the Manotok property at “too cheap to turn-down” or at so-called “pre-development” prices?

Similarly, the University of the Philippines, has been victimized by these scamming real estate land-grabbing syndicates that try their best to make quick-money by selling something that is not even for sale.

CAVEAT EMPTOR in Quezon City.

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