CAGAYAN de Oro City Vice Mayor Raineir Joaquin “Kikang” Uy will soon become the subject of a complaint at the Office of the Ombudsman after a lawyer bared his plans to sue Uy for supposedly dereliction of duty for supposedly failing to perform his duties as city mayor.
In an interview, Lawyer Rico Pajo said he filed the case before the Ombudsman last February 21 against Uy for “failure to perform his duty as mayor” the moment the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) served a dismissal order for Moreno last February 7.
"It's in our laws that should there be any vacancy in a mayor or a governor's position, the vice mayor or vice governor will take over and function as mayor," Pajo said.
Pajo said he also believed that the DILG served the dismissal order validly.
It can be recalled that Moreno was yet again ordered out by the Ombudsman for leasing a heavy equipment supposedly without public bidding when he was still governor of Misamis Oriental.
It has been a month since the dismissal order and the subsequent Court of Appeals (CA) decision favoring Moreno. The CA decision consolidating all of Moreno's cases made the recent dismissal order "moot and academic", Moreno's camp claims.
"It is his lawyer's interpretation that the consolidation made the Ombudsman decision moot and academic, but as for me, it was not the case. The DILG already served the dismissal order even before that CA decision, so by the time the decision came out, he was already dismissed," Pajo added.
"Mayor Kikang also was informed about the vacancy right after, so he should have taken over, unless he was incapacitated at the time," Pajo said.
"We want to avoid complicating our treasury, because who knows in the coming days, Moreno is after all not allowed to sign checks and payrolls. Our people will be hurt, in the end the constituents will be the most affected of this issue," he said.
Pajo said he is not working for anyone, and filed the complaint ‘on his own as a concerned citizen.’
"This has been going on for so long, there are many talks but less actions. So I thought, why shouldn't I make the action?" he said.
"My case will clear everything whether or not Kikang is rightfully the mayor of Cagayan de Oro, once and for all end the issue," he added.
Sixty-year-old Pajo is one of the lawyers who filed a case against Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA)-Northern Mindanao former regional chief Adrian Albarino and several operatives for an alleged rubout during an anti-illegal drug operation in Claveria, Misamis Oriental.