Punchline
Mayor Lim’s crafty manipulation
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
WE, in The PUNCH, are certainly inspired and feel fulfilled in our mission to report the truth to Pangasinenses knowing that we are gaining more readers and support for what we do.
Our copies are not only seeing increased street sales each week, we are regularly getting requests for reprints of issues from readers who support our advocacy for good governance. They ask for copies they can distribute in their respective barangays in Dagupan City for others to read! They said they want to help empower fellow Dagupeños with true facts that only The PUNCH reports.
Indeed, there can be no better compliment for a community newspaper like ours than to see its readers manifesting their respect and support for the work it does by making sure more people read it.
The increasing support for our print version by our readers is being mirrored in the number of hits we are seeing for our online (internet) version. We have also noted a sharp increase in the number of Pangasineneses around the globe that are already turning to The PUNCH Online for their access to truth about Pangasinan affairs.
Salamat ya balbaleg ed sikayon amin.
P.S. Oh yes, we will not deny that our readers’ efforts to get as many to read The PUNCH certainly enables us to earn a bit more to help us sustain our publication. Believe it or not, all our copies must be accounted for because printing costs are not cheap. So, the morons in BSL’s pockets who insist that we are giving away thousands of copies for free simply to be read are a bunch of ignoramus who don’t understand what it takes to run a legitimate newspaper business. In the first place, what can we possibly gain from giving away free copies that cost a lot of money? Perhaps it’s the norm for “newspapers” that print 100 copies weekly for purposes of qualifying to publish judicial notices. After all, printing recycled news reports and space-filler columns don’t cost anything. But not for The PUNCH.
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SECRET DELIGHT. But obviously, the truth we regularly report doesn’t sit well with those who’ve been trying hard as hell to hide the ugly truths about themselves at all costs.
At all costs means having to pay pseudo journalists who don’t have a clue about what integrity is all about, to lie for them. More specifically, I am told by loyal readers that BSL’s media lapdogs in Dagupan have been very busy last week earning their keep by discrediting The PUNCH anew after we published very incriminating proofs of deceit on the part of Mr. Lim over the fire sale of MC Adore.
I gathered that BSL’s trumpeters have been shouting their voices hoarse over the airwaves till their faces turned blue in a vain attempt to shred our credibility for alleging that the Lim administration duped the city for at least a P100 million when it undersold the MC Adore property to a “highest bidder”! Unfortunately for Mr. Lim, the harder his cheap lapdogs tried to discredit The PUNCH without presenting an iota of credible argument to belie our report, they only served to help confirm what we reported to the Dagupeños – that the mayor duped the city!
But I do think that secretly, the cheap “loudspeakers” are extremely delighted that we do what we do because if we didn’t, they wont be paid to earn their keep to buy value meals for themselves. Simply by talking about how great Mr. Lim is not causing a bump in their measly pay. With a target like The PUNCH, reportedly Mr. Benjie Lim’s major pain in the ass, they are finally getting some value for themselves. What a way to live a low life!
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CONSPIRATORS OR PLAIN GULLIBLE? Perhaps, Mr. Lim doesn’t really care how people perceive him even when he’s caught dipping his fingers in the cookie jar much too often that he refuses to explain or to account to the people. Fine, he can do that before the Ombudsman. But I wonder how the people who trusted him but were deliberately misled feel today. Unless they were part of the conspiracy to defraud the city of hundreds of millions for which they must have been paid their share of the loot, others will hasten to say that they were naively gullible in allowing themselves to be used in an ingenious plot to serve an immoral profit agenda.
Note that even BSL’s mad lapdogs could not defend his abominable official act for embarrassing his own friends in the business community when he made them submit an atrociously low price for the MC Adore land as members of the appraisal committee. Mr. Lim hid the fact (or did he?) that he sold his property for P35k per sq. m., not even remotely close to the P15k per sq.m. that he made the heads of the local chapters of the Chamber of the Real Estate and Builders’ Association, the United Architects of the Philippines and the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry swear to.
Evidently, Mr. Lim had no qualms making the organizations’ representatives sign a “fixed” official document even knowing that it would make them look stupid, ignorant and incompetent if discovered. And that’s exactly what they now appear to be today for defending his claim! (The case of the Judas 9 is a different story…it was about plain and simple greed and corruption).
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INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF. Mr. Lim has yet to deny the veracity of the incriminating documents published in our last issue. I assure Mr. Lim and his pea-brained lapdogs howling like hyenas inside radio station booths that any official reaction through the city’s information office or directly from Mr. Lim himself will have a space in our front page but its position will depend on the lie he wants the public to believe. As far as we can see, the deed of sale he signed with Landbank in 2005 is incontrovertible and not even his faked birth certificate, bidding and invoices for overpriced products purchased by the city hall can discredit the deed.
In the absence of any document that would belie the deed of sale, Mayor Lim clearly and deliberately manipulated the situation to make the city lose over a P100 million in revenues and make someone millions richer overnight. The next question is in the public’s mind is: How did he benefit from it? Or should the question be: How much?
So let’s hear it from you, Mayor Lim. Concerned citizens are already demanding that you account for the city’s loss! Why did you do make the city lose over P100 milllion?
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WARNING DEPED. Don’t look now but the Lim administration is already setting the stage for another mother of corruption for a long planned “value engineering project” in 2013 – the construction of the P50-M 21-bed lying-in Maternal Hospital.
The DepEd should be warned that the Dagupan City government is about to replicate what it did to sell the MC Adore property – to make the case moot and academic in spite of what anybody says, including the DepEd. Mr. Lim will demolish the Juan P. Guadiz Elementary School even before DepEd can decide on whether to transfer the pupils or not. He will simply force the transfer of the pupils by demolishing the school this month.
Recall how Mr. Lim, as head of the disposal committee for the MC Adore, proceeded with the bidding even if the court has not decided the case filed against him. He preempted the court by announcing a winning bid, making it appear that the court is now irrelevant.
So watch out for the demolition of the school, with or without the DepEd’s permission, to happen this month (before the start of the local campaign period in March). I suggest that DepEd seeks the police’s help to secure the school and protect the national government’s property.
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