Punchline
Game of deception
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
LAST week, Mayor Benjie Lim went on air refuting our allegations of irregularities that attended the resolution granting him blanket authority to negotiate the sale of the Mc Adore property and a Calasiao land without terms of reference and guidelines with nothing but off-the-cuff commentaries.
He kept on referring to our claims as stupid. Oh yeah? On the allegation that the onor-onors received bribes, he said it was not possible since no sale has been consummated, therefore, it was not possible for anyone to distribute bribes! (Mr. Lim, only your onor-onors who earn their keep by swallowing everything you say will believe that). The more Mr. Lim tries to explain himself, the longer his nose becomes making Pinocchio a true imitation of life. Tsk-tsk.
Ok, let’s do a rewind to just a few of his tainted “initiatives” to demonstrate how Mr. Lim operated and got away with his schemes.
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TAINTED LAND DEALS. Recall how Mayor Lim orchestrated the grossly overpriced 30-hectare land in San Jacinto ostensibly for a sanitary landfill project of the city. He created a committee with onor-onors as members and dummy city hall officials as members. The committee told the city that buying the farmland for P16 M, instead of P7 M, was a “good deal”. (That’s Mr. Lim’s arithmetic). On hindsight, that was only a small detail of the scandalous deal.
The package deal that lined many onor-onors’ pockets included a game of deception in broad daylight. The committee downplayed the land reform issue that was raised by the tenants at least a month before the city coughed up P16 M. A costly and critical factor for the city. Fast forward to 2011, the land has been completely covered by land reform and the title to the property was never transferred to the city!
Then, his committee also did not report to the city the fact that it was buying the property then from a 4-month old new owner, not from the decades-old original owner of the farm. The new owner was Jose Mariano Cuna, widely known in local business circle as Mr. Lim’ s “business associate.” The information gathered by the PUNCH then indicated that Mr. Cuna did not have the means to buy and invest in the 30-hectare farm and that the suspicion was that it was actually Mr. Lim who funded Mr. Cuna’s purchase. That virtually pointed to the mayor as the real owner of the P7M property and bought by the city for P16 M.
Again, fast forward to 2012, the suspicion is gaining credibility because Mr. Lim has not lifted a finger to seek the return of the P16 M from Mr. Cuna for failing to transfer the land title to the city, an undertaking that any businessman worth his salt (BSL’s favorite phrase) would do to protect his investment.
Curiously, the city auditor has not found Mr. Lim liable for violation of the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act over the years. Paging the Ombudsman!
Then, rewind to the controversial lease contract awarded to the owners of the Metro Plaza in 2007 by then two-termer Mayor Lim. The building permit was denied by the upright City Engineer Virginia Rosario who determined that the resolution passed by the onor-onor councilors granting the lease to the corporation was grossly defective. The project was suspended before Mr. Lim bowed out in 2007 and through out Mayor Al Fernandez’s term. Then lo and behold, shortly after Mr. Lim reassumed his post in 2010, soon as the uncooperative city engineer went on leave, he had the building permit issued by his acting city engineer! Last year, the court upheld the city engineer in the complaint filed against her but the building was already occupied by commercial tenants. What is not generally known is the fact the sanggunian resolution remains defective to date. (The owners claim the legal defect has been corrected by a Supreme Court decision but no copy of such a decision was ever made pubic.). Question: Why did not Mr. Lim have the establishment closed promptly in spite of the court ruling on the case filed against the city engineer? The answer is much too obvious even for a stupid onor-onor of the past and present.
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ANOTHER GAME OF DECEPTION Back to the plotted obscene land deals on the MC Adore and Calasiao properties being rammed down Dagupeños throats.
My Mayor Benjie claims that the sale of an idle property is the best thing to do for the city, I agree. But that is not for him to say because it was he who not only made the city buy the property from the Assets and Privatization Trust but made it idle since 2001. It was he who told Dagupeños that the P50 M was a good investment because it would serve as the new and inexpensive city hall of the city cum-commercial building for national government offices.
It remains idle to this day because he never seriously planned to make it useful after he made the city buy it, yet today he has the gall to justify the fire sale because it is idle even insinuating that it was not he who was responsible for leaving it idle! Hello? Tell that to your onor-onors who have close resemblances with Judas!
Given Mr. Lim’s most unusual hankering to consummate another land deal (using his tested formula- buy high, sell low) for the city, many finally suspect that Mr. Lim had actually long planned on a buy-and-sell scheme early on, not a development plan, for the MC Adore. (It’d be interesting to find out from public records how much was paid in commission for the sale of the bank-repossessed hotel to the city, and how much the would-be owner would pay corrupt city officials who would lend their names to the effort to undervalue the MC Adore and Calasiao properties as basis for the sale. Offhand, one can readily conclude, a businessman would always seek to recover the cost of the “30 pieces of silver” (estimated to be P18 M), and the main broker’s fee (to be determined at the point of sale). Of course, the onor-onors only know too well that friendly “negotiations will take care of all that. Right, Onor-onors Samson, Canto, Reyna, Manaois-Reyna, Coquia, Lim, Erfe-Mejia, Vallejos, and Gonzales?
Then he challenges VM Belen to a public debate on the issue. Good, but before doing the “show” with his “sing-and-dance” routine, he should first explain in writing just a few of the issues that had been raised here just so people know he’s not going to spin more lies and deception.
Now, here’s an even more interesting tidbit from my highly reliable city hall insider. He insists that the buyer of the two properties will actually be someone’s dummies literally. I asked for proofs and he wryly pointed to my own findings on the Awai land deal. “Bad habits are hard to break, tested formula that works is always put into good use,” he reminded me. “Just watch and remember the template,” he added.
I thought that was a bit hard to believe. In fact I was also informed that a giant supermarket chain with several branches in Metro Manila (“friendly” to Mr. Lim since his Duty-Free stint as GM)) is behind the mad push for a fire sale. But OK, let’s see how this saga finally ends. I sure hope my nosey city hall insider is wrong…or talagang nakaka-bilib na talaga si BSL! If Mr. Lim pulls this off, I’d say there would be no one in this world who can best articulate “Shared Responsibility” as a policy in governance, that which makes mockery of what decency, good governance and the Ombudsman stand for, but him
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I AM A PANGASINENSE! All eyes will be on Pangasinan in the next seven days. Translate that into seven sleepless nights for Guv Spines and his core team overseeing the proceedings at the Palarong Pambansa. But the burden should not rest on their shoulders alone, it should rest on all of us.
It is every self-respecting Pangasinense’s responsibility to see to it that nothing gets in the way of a desired seamless affair. We should rise together to impress upon visitors that Pangasinenses are one of the most hospitable and smilingest people in the country, never mind that the Pangasinan language sounds Greek to them.
We should reach out to visiting athletes, spectators and media and teach them a thing or two about our food, history and culture. Teach them “Inaro ta ka…kumusta kila…Pigara ya…Magangana ka…Dia la…Diman ni…(including how we cheerily cuss in jest as in b…m!). Check out the Pangasinan Tourism on Facebook and the official website of the provincial government and pick out some interesting trivia. You will be pleasantly surprised why, indeed, it can be more fun in Pangasinan.
Above all, let us seek to protect every visitor from opportunistic vendors and tricycle drivers.
So, let’s go out there and introduce ourselves – “Pangasinan ako”!
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ERFES’ MATRIARCHS. It gives me immense pleasure to inform our readers that our Erfe clan prides itself with a strong, active, amazingly mentally alert matriarch at age 97! She is our Lola Pacing Erfe Verzosa of San Fabian, the eldest of the Erfe brood. Relatives and friends celebrated her nurturing and witty presence last Tuesday at the town’s parish church compound.
We would all love to see her and our other surviving matriarch, her younger sister, our Lola Gloria Erfe-Mendoza (now of Malasiqui and mother of brothers Father Oliver and Ed) live through the 100-year mark!
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