Friday, April 04, 2008 Legal question bugs rice raid By Karlon N. Rama Sun.Star Staff Reporter
BUSINESSMAN Regan King wants the Regional Trial Court (RTC) to quash the search warrant used in the raid against the Mandaue City warehouse containing his rice stocks.
Cebu City Councilor Gerry Carillo, in his private capacity as a practicing lawyer, filed the motion to quash before the sala of RTC Executive Judge Fortunato de Gracia.
The motion, he said in an interview yesterday, rests on two grounds—that the RTC did not have jurisdiction over the issue when it issued the search warrant and that King had the authority to operate the raided warehouse.
National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Regional Director Medardo de Lemos, in a separate interview, said they are leaving the matter to the court.
He asked Special Investigator Arnel Pura to turn over everything they found during the search to the court, including the 30,000 sacks of rice inside the warehouse they raided and padlocked Wednesday night.
The rice remains inside the warehouse after the National Food Authority (NFA), the lead agency during the raid, refused to take custody of it in a meeting held at the NFA regional office yesterday morning.
It was the NFA who certified that the warehouse, registered as belonging to former Cebu Ports Authority manager Mariano C.J. Martinez, was not among those authorized by the NFA to store rice.
King, however, said he was issued a license by the NFA.
In an interview Wednesday night, he confirmed having leased the warehouse from Martinez and then securing a license under the business name Jolli Traders International Inc.
Storage
De Lemos, a lawyer, said the NBI has served the search warrant issued by the court and, as far as the agency is concerned, that is that.
“Based on our information, the warehouse is not among those authorized by the NFA for rice storage and warehousing activity. We secured and implemented a search warrant issued by the court and discovered that there was rice inside. So we took custody of it by letting it remain in the warehouse and padlocking it for proper disposition,” de Lemos said.
He said the NBI will not involve itself in the issue of whether or not the importation was valid, adding that the only subject of the raid was the alleged illegal warehouse operation.
“If they have the papers to show that the warehouse was operating legally, then it is up to them to present it to the court,” he said.
On why they secured the sacks of rice, de Lemos said it was the best way to preserve the evidence.
Basis
After all, he added, the search was done on the basis of Presidential Decree 4, a special law that has provisions of imprisonment and fine for those operating warehouses to store rice without authority.
“In a case involving a warehouse that is allegedly operating illegally, what is the evidence? The warehouse or whatever it was that wasn’t supposed to be there, but was?” he asked.
Besides, he maintained, it was not as if the rice could be brought anywhere anyway.
He pointed out that the Bureau of Customs had not yet released the rice from its custody to the owner, King. It was still undergoing inventory after having been made the subject of an alert order issued by the Office of the Commissioner of Customs.
He said they only made sure that it remained where it was.
De Lemos yesterday ordered that the padlock on the warehouse be opened to allow officials from the Bureau of Customs to continue their inventory of the stocks.
Position
During the raid Wednesday night, an official from the Customs Intelligence and Investigation Services (CIIS) was found guarding the stocks while an examiner conducted an inventory.
Carillo, in yesterday’s interview, said he filed the formal motion to quash at 3 p.m. yesterday and asked that it be set for a hearing on Tuesday. (Monday is a non-working holiday.)
“Our position is that the RTC had no jurisdiction to even issue the search warrant or any other order because it (the rice shipment) was still under the custody of the Bureau of Customs, undergoing inventory. It had not yet been released,” he said.
Even if it had already been released, he said, the raided warehouse had all of the permits necessary for rice storage as evidenced by an NFA permit they attached to the motion.
The permit that Sun.Star Cebu was shown last Wednesday night is an application for a license that bore the signatures, but not the names, of the supposed approving authority.
