Mayor: Businessman inserts doubtful pages on contract

MAYOR Vicente Emano admitted that cancelling the supposed contract for a Chinese businessman to lease parts of the Carmen public market in Carmen, Cagayan de Oro, was due to doubtful insertions.

“If it wasn’t strictly reviewed, I may have signed it,” Emano said over a radio talk Wednesday.

He said Jacky Cheng even admitted that his camp has had inserted some entries at the contract that violated the verbal agreement they had with the mayor when they announced their intention to rent the second floor and an area at the ground floor of the market building late last year.

Emano said they earlier agreed that Cheng’s Wishing Star, the leasing company, would not display meat, fish and vegetables that are already available at the first floor so as to not affect the sales of small time vendors.

But since the establishment of Unitop, a department store and supermarket that subleased the second floor, vendors have had hard time earning from their low sales that most of the market customers prefer to shop at the said store where they can also find complete household needs including meat, fish and vegetables.

The P250 million Unitop department store started operation only in December 2011.

“I allowed them to lease the areas to generate employment on the condition that their set-up is only as a department store as they would kill the poor vendors,” Emano added. “They (Wishing Star) have bigger investments compared to lowly stall owners.”

The mayor said: “Because the contract document is thick, they (Cheng camp) didn’t expect that we would discover unnecessary insertions which would actually violate the agreement.”

“They intend to outsmart the poor people and not me. That’s what I hate,” he stressed.

Emano said Wishing Star had started leasing in December 2011, months after the city legal office found out that the prepared contract was defective.

“It (contract) was reviewed for me to sign, but since we discovered that it was defective I did not sign it. We want to elevate this in court to be fair before we cancel the contract,” he said.

Subleasing

The mayor even criticized Wishing Star for subleasing the rented area to Unitop department store saying “Jacky Cheng earned huge out of subleasing it.”

“Approximately, Jacky Cheng receives more than P600, 000 rent per month from the subleased area (second floor) while he pays (the city government) only P150, 000 monthly rent,” Emano said. “In fact, he was not the one who spent for the establishment of Unitop...a very naughty man.”

The City Government, Emano said, has no choice but to hold the leased area for bidding. “Unitop department store can actually join the bidding,” the mayor added.