I REMEMBER reading a Supreme Court decision where the ponente, the erudite Justice Isagani Cruz, wrote with unmistakable disgust that the defense did not even have the grace of fiction.
Did those who have consistently followed the case of the destroyed Cebu City mayor’s office feel the same way after they heard former Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s updated version of the incident? Just asking.
The update is contained in Osmeña’s letter to incumbent Mayor Edgardo Labella where he revealed for the first time that the men of Dakay Construction whom he sent to recover his personal properties from his soon-to-be-vacated office had orders to restore it to its 2016 condition.
However, “(t)he restoration of the office to its 2016 state is still incomplete due to the interruption, intervention and stoppage brought by your lawyers,” Osmeña told Labella, referring to the latter’s former law partners, Floro Casas Jr. and Rey Gealon, who are now the city administrator and city attorney, respectively.
The claim that the restoration is incomplete presupposes that the repair work had already been started and was in fact ongoing until Casas and Gealon unreasonably intervened. The initial description as well as the photos and videotapes that were taken of the mayor’s office immediately after the incident only showed wreckage. It would thus be interesting to find out which part of the office has already been initially repaired.
I am not sure about Gealon but I know that Casas was a member of Labella’s transition team. Osmeña himself formed his own counterpart team to coordinate with Labella’s men to insure a smooth turnover by the old to the new mayor in compliance with a memorandum order of the Department of Interior and Local Government.
Did Osmeña’s team coordinate with the Labella group regarding the outgoing mayor’s plan to retrieve his things from his office? Apparently not, the “clearing operations” were done in the wee hours of the night purportedly to avoid disrupting work at City Hall.
If there had been coordination, the joint transition committee could have agreed on a plan of action, including what items to remove and how. Consequently, Labella’s camp could not have found any reason to claim shock upon their discovery of the state of the mayor’s office the day after because they would have already known that the destruction would be repaired anyhow.
By the way, if Osmeña had a restoration plan in place at the time that he ordered his workers to clean out his office, why didn’t he mention it when he was interviewed on national radio a couple of days after the incident? Waited for the media frenzy to die down? But that did not prevent him from saying that he removed his things because “nabuwisit na rin ako” and he wanted Labella to experience how it feels!
It doesn’t sound very convincing but then I am not the one who will judge him. They have documents and witnesses to prove that Osmeña did no wrong, his lawyer said. Let’s wait and see if their story is persuasive enough or, failing that, has at least the grace of fiction.