A CEBU-BASED businessman has filed graft and corruption charges against two Cebu City prosecutors before the Office of the Ombudsman Visayas for alleged extortion and using their positions to favor certain personalities in some cases they have handled.
In his four-page complaint, businessman Mark Yu said Cebu City Prosecutors Liceria Lofranco-Rabillas and Gandhi Truya committed grave misconduct and violated Republic Act 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act.
Yu said his complaint against Rabillas and Truya began in 2016 when he filed criminal cases against his former business partner for estafa and other violations before the Cebu City Prosecutor’s Office.
The anti-graft office received Yu’s complaint on Thursday, Dec. 17, 2020.
Sought for comment, Rabillas told SunStar Cebu that she cannot comment on the complaint filed against her as she has yet to read its contents.
After noticing that most of the cases he filed before the city prosecutor were all junked, Yu decided to approach Truya, who was the reviewing officer of the Cebu City Prosecutor’s Office and was a handling prosecutor in some of Yu’s cases.
Yu said he considered Truya a friend as they often see each other at the Cebu City Sports Complex along with common friends.
Yu said that during their meeting, he opened up to Truya about his disappointment over how Truya handled the case he filed against Yu’s former business partner.
Yu’s complaint said that in response, Truya told Yu that he was forced to dismiss the case on orders of Rabillas, his direct superior.
Yu’s former business partner was reportedly being backed by “somebody powerful and influential” whom Rabillas owed a lot, Truya told Yu, as Yu said in his complaint.
“I was shocked with what I heard and asked Prosecutor Gandhi Truya how can I be assured that something like that will not happen again and he told me that I only need to befriend his Chief and support her when the needs arises and that will be the only way that I can be assured that my cases will not be disturbed by third parties,” Yu said, in his complaint.
This was not the last time Yu and Truya met.
In February 2018, Yu was meeting with a friend at the Cebu Provincial Capitol when he chanced upon Truya near the Capitol parking lot.
Yu said Truya called him out and said he had some “good news” for him.
Truya then gave him a piece of paper and written on it was Rabillas’s supposedly bank account number.
According to Yu’s complaint, Truya told Yu that Rabillas gave him her bank account number so he could deposit P50,000 that she could use for an event in Bohol that she would be attending.
After consulting his friends and associates about it, Yu deposited P50,000 to Rabillas’s bank account.
Yu then went to Truya’s office and showed him the deposit slip, which Truya took.
When Yu’s cases with his former business partner were settled, Yu told Rabillas that his wife could not appear before her to take oath on their affidavit of desistance as she was ill and immuno-compromised.
Upon hearing of the situation of Yu’s wife, Rabillas allegedly told Yu to take her to their house so that his wife could take her oath and sign their affidavit.
Yu thought that Rabillas’s gesture was a sign that the city prosecutor was now his “friend.”
In 2019, Yu filed three estafa cases against his business adversaries but he was upset to learn that these were dismissed by the Cebu City Prosecutor’s Office.
He sought Truya for clarification but the prosecutor became “evasive.”
Yu said he was further convinced to file a complaint against Truya and Rabillas after he found out that Truya was a school batchmate of his former business partner whom he filed estafa charges against in 2016. / JKV