DoJ chief reverses estafa raps on ‘sellers’ of Luneta Hotel

By Benjamin B. Pulta

10/16/2009

A ruling by the Justice secretary has dropped the criminal charges for syndicated estafa and falsification of public documents filed by prosecutors this year against a group of businessmen with links to the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos for allegedly attempting to sell the historic Luneta Hotel in downtown Manila.

In an 8-page resolution, Secretary Agnes Devanadera reversed and set aside the charges against Erlinda Panlilio, Marlo Cristobal, Nicole Morris, Jose Marcel Panlilio and Herminio Valerio in a complaint filed by H.E. Heacock Resources Corp. represented by Santiago Alvarez Jr.

In granting the motions for reconsideration the Department of Justice (DoJ) also ordered the city prosecutor to withdraw the information for syndicated estafa against the respondents pending before the Manila regional trial court (RTC).

Among other things, Devanadera explained there was no law punishing the crime when the act was committed 36 years ago.

“To apply the law which defined and penalized syndicated estafa only in 1980 to an element of the latter, particularly the solicitation of monetary constribution of stockholders in 1973, would be a retroactive application of a penal law which violates the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto law.”

The ruling also upheld the arguments of two respondents, Morris and J. Panlilio who were merely four and nine years old, respectively, at the time of the alleged offense and could not have been “conspirators” in the alleged offense.

In the reversed nine-page resolution dated Jan. 19, 2009 the DoJ through State Prosecutor Philip de la Cruz found probable cause against Erlinda Panlilio, Marlo Cristobal, Nicole Morris, Jose Marcel Panlilio and Herminio Valerio.

The complainant in the case, H.E. Heacock Resources Corp., sought the help of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) on the matter.

Luneta Hotel stands on 499.5-square meters of land located on T. M. Kalaw Street, Ermita, Manila and was originally owned by the Rizal Park Hotel Inc. (RPHI) which was incorporated on Nov. 27,1972.

The original incorporators of RPHI were Erlinda Panlilio, Rebecco Panlilio, Modesto Enriquez, Trinidad Enriquez and Leandro Enriquez.They all assigned and transferred all their respective shares of stock to Heacock Resources on Sept. 15, 1973.

Later RPHI’s registration as a corporation was revoked by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2003. One of the respondents, Erlinda Panlilio, who had remained as a trustee of RPHI after the transfer of Luneta Hotel to Heacock, was later to have discovered to have tried to sell the property on May 15, 2007 for P25,000 to Beaumont Holdings Co.

The NBI in Questioned Documents Report No. 328-589 dated June 1, 1989 reported that the certificate of title presented by the Panlilio Group is fake. As a result, the Registry of Deeds did not allow the registration of the Deed of Sale in favor of the JBA Group of Management and Development Corp. to whom the property was sold by the Panlilio Group.

The second time the sale of the hotel was attempted was when Marlo Cristobal representing himself as the duly elected corporate secretary of RPHI filed a petition for lost duplicate copy of the certificate of title.

To go around the standing documents on the building’s ownership, respondents Erlinda Panlilio, Nicole Morris, Jose Marcel Panlilio and Cristobal put up a corporation named as Rizal Park Hotel Corp. and registered it with the SEC in February 2007.

“A consideration of the circumstances of the case shows that all the elements of syndicated estafa are present in the case,” the DoJ had said.

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