Punchline
The wheeling, dealing and lying at the city council
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
I was given a copy of the minutes of the December 18, 2006 special meeting of the Dagupan City Council, the day the conspirators met to deliver on the deal on the Magsaysay Park project. It made for an interesting read for a study on arrogance, plotting, white-wash, cover-up and greed. I believe the statements as attributed are damning enough to convict those who evidently participated in the nefarious plot.
Lifting from the sequence of events, the conspirators tried to ensure their success by making certain that those who were clearly against the project would not be given their notice of the meeting on time, so they would not make it to the meeting.
Councilors Jose Netu Tamayo and Alex de Venecia didn’t get theirs. This gave Councilor Teofilo Guadiz III, the slotman, the opportunity to act as the majority floor leader, and Councilor Vlad Mata, his wingman, as assistant majority floor leader, to ward off all attempts to foil the conspiracy. On hand to make sure that the script was strictly followed were City Administrator Raffy Baraan and City Legal Officer Geraldine Baniqued. But in one instance, it was a condescending Guadiz who ordered Baraan to sit down and not to open his mouth during the interpellation stage. Arf-arf!
Note that while the debate focused on the role of Metrostate Realty Corp., its majority owners (Architect Mark Siapno and cousin Alex Siapno) were never invited to the committee hearing, not to any special session, and certainly not on December 19. (The Siapno cousins, scions of prominent families in the city, were mum on the issue from the very start, and only the documents submitted by Baraan and Baniqued did the talking for them, and now by Guadiz, a second cousin of Alex Siapno).
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Here are some of the very glaring irrational claims, inconsistencies and lies submitted by Onor-Onor Guadiz to the council, but who still managed to get away with them, thanks to guaranteed majority vote of his fellow conspirators.
1. Guadiz said a committee hearing was attended by Onor-onors Mata and Danilo Torio. (Our view: No committee hearing was ever announced before, during and after any special and regular session).
2. Guadiz said Metrostate Realty Corporation presented a letter from the Equitable PCI Bank certifying to the P8 million credit line granted the S&F Realty Corp. and which he said effectively qualified Metrostate in spite of its limited P100,000 paid-up capital. (Metrostate opened its account at Metrobank, not in Equitable. The Equitable certification was for S&F, not Metrostate, but Guadiz insisted the certification was transferable to Metrostate. Really?? It will be useful for Councilor Farah Decano who bore down on Guadiz on the issue, to get a formal statement from the bank that it is prepared to grant an P8 million credit facility to a small-time company that is not even its client! I’ll bet a million that no bank is so stupid to follow Guadiz’s legal gobbledygook. Or is Equitable PCI stupid? Oh no, that’s my bank! One can only surmise why Metrobank did not issue the certification for P8 million credit line to Metrostate, its own client).
3. Guadiz said S&F Realty and LXS Builders are two separate corporations that pooled their capitalization together to form Metrostate Realty Corp., it being a joint venture, “a merger of capital”. (Guadiz initially misrepresented LXS Builders as a corporation, until he was told it is owned by single proprietorship. Granting that the two pooled their resources, did the two business groups only have P50,000 each in their respective banks before they formed the new company? In which case, is it normal for Equitable PCI to grant small-time companies huge credit lines?).
4. Guadiz said the city government was in estoppel when it did not object to the deed of undertaking executed by the Siapno cousins for the “future corporation.” (The deed was the first hint of the conspiracy yet instead of charging Baraan and Baniqued for gross incompetence and dereliction of duty, Guadiz glibly used it to justify the qualification of Metrostate! Bakit kaya?? That’s a two million peso question for you, reader!).
5. Guadiz said since the government will not fund the project (it being a Build-Operate-Transfer scheme), the track record of Metrostate is not required, and just the mere compliance with the financial requirement which Equitable PCI provided S&F is sufficient. (If that was the case, then what was the pre-bidding process all about if all that was needed was a dubious bank certification?)
6. Guadiz said GAMMA Corp. was disqualified from the onset because it did not have the PCAB license. The same qualification was not required of Metrostate because it was still not formed at the time. It was LXS Builders, one of the Metrostate partners that had it but following the principle of subrogation, then Metrostate was qualified. (Duh? Someone must have changed the Logic 101 curriculum when Guadiz decided to study law).
7. Guadiz said Alex Guadiz Siapno is the proprietor of LXS Builders that merged with S&F Realty Corporation. (Councilor Guadiz initially denied knowing that Alex is an incorporator in Metrostate, then pointed out later that Alex is simply a minor stockholder in Metrostate, a fact, he said, he did not know until he studied the case. With this kind of lawyering by an obviously lying councilor, Alex Siapno should thank his stars that he is not being defended by Guadiz in a murder case).
8. Guadiz said Alex Guadiz Siapno is just another distant relative. (Guadiz refused to state Alex is, in fact, the son of Felipe Siapno and Nora Guadiz, the first cousin of the councilor’s father, hmmm, very “distant”, indeed, for a lawyer like him. Why was he defensive about it? Bakit kaya?).
9. Guadiz wanted the interpellation by Councilors Decano and Tamayo stopped for being “redundant” in the middle of the questioning of Atty. Baniqued. (Guadiz was evidently unusually in a hurry to have his committee report, finding Metrostate as the legal winner of the bidding, approved. Bakit kaya?? )
I am certain that the anti-corruption group that will file the case with the Ombudsman will find the minutes very “educational”.
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THE TIP OF THE ACCRETION. The recent expose’ of Mr. Juanito Lagao on the indiscriminate claims of ownership of lands inside the Tondaligan Park appears to be mind-boggling, but it is actually only the tip of the iceberg! In addition to the scandal looming at the Tondaligan, there are more tax declarations being paid for certificates of alienability and disposability by the DENR in barangay Pugaro and some areas of Dawel. More on this next week.
Curiously, the city’s environmental expert consultant, Nic Melecio, never raised a howl over the past years on these clear land-grabbing cases. Bakit kaya?
(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/punchline/)
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