Indian national swindles fellow Indian national
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
LANGUAGE was a major challenge in this rather unusual estafa case as it involved two foreigners battling in a Philippine court.
But the man in charge, Judge Ulysses Raciles Butuyan of Branch 51 of the Regional Trial Court in Tayug, made sure that nothing – or as little as possible – was lost in translation.
Butuyan decided that the accused, an Indian national named Surjit Ram, is guilty of swindling his compatriot, Makhan Singh, of P250,000.
“Beforehand, the Court must disclose that in resolving the issue of whether or not the alleged guilt of the accused has been established with proof beyond reasonable doubt, it has painstakingly undertaken a herculean effort to make sense of the respective declarations of the complainant and the accused, Indian nationals both, when they took turns on the witness stand,” Butuyan wrote at the beginning of his decision promulgated on October 27.
Both Ram and Singh were apparently not fluent in either Filipino (sometimes referred to as Tagalog), the Philippine national language; nor English, widely used in court proceedings; nor Ilocano or Pangasinan, the two other vernaculars used in the province.
The court personnel, Butuyan said, “…virtually wracked their brains out, heaved deep sighs of relief every time they successfully drove home the point the ‘Bombays’ expressed in anguished Tagalog”.
Singh accused Ram of taking P250,000 from him in late 2005, supposedly to help the former process an expired passport and visa, which the latter never delivered.
Ram has previously helped another one of their fellow Indians, an old man named Ram Partrap, which prompted Singh to trust in Ram.
In his decision, the presiding judge cited that compatriots in a foreign land “expectedly bond together like brothers… they would tend to be each other’s keeper in times of distress or need”.
“But the spirit of compatriotism is never fair game to abuse,” Butuyan said.
Singh’s claim was corroborated by a witness, Donato Areola, a former kagawad in Barangay Agno, Tayug where he lives.
On the other hand, Ram, did not present any witness to help his defense and was often absent during scheduled hearings for the case.
Ram was sentenced to six to eight years in prison and ordered to pay back the quarter of a million pesos to Singh plus costs.
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