City must recover P16.12- payment for Awai land – Belen
LIM ADMINISTRATION’S FRAUDULENT DEAL
THE Dagupan City government will seek to recover every single centavo of the P16 million it lost to the fraudulent purchase of the 30-hectare land in Barangay Awai, San Jacinto ostensibly for the city’s sanitary landfill.
This was stressed by Mayor Belen Fernandez in her State of the City Address (SOCA) before the Sangguniang Panlungsod (SP) at CSI Stadia on March 20, promising to exhaust all available legal processes to recover the lost amount that began with the filing of the civil case against former Mayor Benjamin S. Lim and the seller, Jose Mariano Cuña, reportedly a business partner of Lim.
Recall that Fernandez earlier said state auditor Robert Ocampo Sr. ordered the Dagupan City government to file the civil case against the respondents after an audit team determined that the city government should seek to recover the payment made for the Awai land that was never turned over to the city.
Subsequently, City Legal Officer
Geraldine Francisco filed a civil case before the Regional Trial Court last
January against Lim and Cuña in a bid to compel the return of the P16-M
including a 12 percent annual interest.
However, Lim died few days after the civil case was filed. Consequently,
the city government filed a motion before RTC Judge Junius Dalaten to name
Lim’s heirs as respondents to substitute for the deceased mayor. The judge
granted the motion.
The heirs include Cecilia Lim, widow of the late mayor, and their children
Brian and Irene.
Records show it was Cuña who sold the Awai land sometime in March 2002,
just four months after he bought the property from one Estrella Sangalang of
Bolo, San Jacinto in December 2001 for P7 million.
Fernandez described the Awai land deal as highway robbery by officials of
the past city
administration, and called for a stop to this kind of malfeasance that
defrauded Dagupan of its hard-earned
revenue.
She said such a scandal will not happen during her watch. (Leonardo Micua)
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