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Saturday, September 24, 2005
Friar lands bill gets support
By Grecar Nilles
Sun.Star Staff Reporter
Businessmen, church officials, developers and lot owners unanimously agreed to push for the approval of a bill that seeks to validate their ownership of property within the Banilad friar lands.
If House Bill 4400 of Rep. Raul del Mar (Cebu City, north) is approved, it is expected to benefit at least 300,000 occupants of the vast estate, which encompasses at least 19 barangays in the city.
The Office of the Solicitor-General (OSG), which represents the government in all cases in the Supreme Court (CA) and Court of Appeals, also gave a little breather for lot owners who have pending cases in court involving the Banilad friar lands.
The OSG will suspend all legal actions against lot owners until the bill is finalized.
Assistant Solicitor Catherine Joy Mallari assured lot owners that they will not initiate any legal actions against the lot owners until the bill is either passed or disapproved.
The House committee on natural resources hosted in Cebu City yesterday a public hearing on House Bill 4400.
The SC had earlier ruled that neither the Cebu Country Club (CCC) nor the Alonso family owns lot 727 of the Banilad friar lands.
The document both parties have submitted in court did not bear the signature of the secretary of interior and the chief of the bureau of public lands, the SC said.
With such a ruling, the OSG earlier asked the court to order the eviction of the CCC and the Alonso family from the property.
Incidentally, most of the sale certificates and the assignments of sale certificates of the present occupants and owners did not bear the signature of the same government officials.
These documents were made the basis of the issued transfer certificate of titles and reconstituted certificate of titles.
Time out
Mallari said their assurance to hold in abeyance the filing of pleadings against lot owners of the Banilad friar lands estate includes the OSG’s motion to implement the SC decision on the CCC vs. Alonso case.
Del Mar and Rep. Leovigildo B. Banaag, who heads the House committee on natural resources, are hopeful that the bill will cure the “confusion and the cloud of doubt” that hovers over ownership of the property, which reportedly measured about 1,900 hectares, or about six times the size of the South Reclamation Project.
In yesterday’s public hearing, Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, through lawyer Julius Z. Neri, said it is about time the government took steps in resolving the ownership of the friar lands.
“If the bill is passed into law, it would partake of the nature of a remedial stature, which is designed to correct a clearly unjust situation, which may result in the summary deprivation of private owners of their respective portions of the Banilad friar lands estate,” the cardinal said in his position paper.
Vidal’s call
“Justice and equity dictate that the lots in question should be adjudicated to the ones who had been in open, public, adverse and continuous possession for more than 70 years,” Cardinal Vidal also said.
But Assistant City Prosecutor Alexander Acosta said the committee must also take notice that there might be multiple titles or transfer certificates of title on the same property, since the original documents are already lost.
While he admits that some documents may be falsified, Acosta said there have been instances that several titles or documents to prove ownership were issued for one particular lot.
Court issue
But both del Mar and Banaag clarified that it is not the committee but the court that should resolve that issue.
Representatives from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, OSG and Register of Deeds agreed that the bill should be passed, since it is a curative law.
But they also said the bill should also have safeguards to protect the interest of the government and rightful owners.
(September 24, 2005 issue)
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