Sandigan asked to finalize ruling on Danding’s UCPB shares

Government lawyers asked the Sandiganbayan yesterday to declare as final its July 11 ruling declaring businessman Eduardo Cojuangco’s acquisition of United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB) as illegal because the money he used came from public funds.

"The government does not see any need to present additional evidence as the court has established the factual basis of the case. The government does not see any other pertinent issues," Solicitor General Alfredo Benipayo told the Sandiganbayan’s first division in yesterday’s hearing.

Benipayo was referring to the Sandiganbayan’s July 11 ruling that Cojuangco bought 72.2 percent of the bank’s shares using levies imposed on farmers during the regime of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Cojuangco, former president of the Philippine Coconut Authority (Philcoa) during the Marcos regime, attended the hearing. The Ombudsman and the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) alleged that Cojuangco used his closeness to Marcos to advance his own interests.

Cojuangco and other co-respondents — Zamboanga City Mayor Ma. Clara Lobregat and the Coconut Producers Federation of the Philippines (Cocofed) — have sought a reversal of the landmark ruling, arguing that there has been no full-blown trial.

The Sandiganbayan arrived at its July 11 ruling after the OSG sought a partial summary judgment of the 16-year-old case in 2002.

Cojuangco declined to answer questions on his plans for the 2004 presidential elections and the controversial coco levy cases. He referred them to his lawyer, former solicitor general Estelito Mendoza.

Lawyers representing Lobregat and Cocofed asked for an oral argument, which the Sandiganbayan set on Nov. 11.

Mendoza asked the court to require the prosecution to put into writing the government’s waiver of their right to present more evidence, but Justices Teresita Leonardo-de Castro, Diosdado Peralta and Francisco Villaruz said the transcript of stenographic notes was more than enough proof that the government wants the ruling to be final and does not want to present more evidence.

Cojuangco lost his majority stake in UCPB after the Sandiganbayan ruled the coco levy funds used to acquire the First United Bank, now UCPB, were public.

The ruling held that Cojuangco’s 95,304 UCPB shares, paid for by Philcoa through the coconut levy funds in 1975, were "conclusively owned by the Republic of the Philippines."

The ruling came two years after the Supreme Court ruled in December 2001 that the coco levy funds are "prima facie public funds." This became the Sandiganbayan’s basis to determine whether Cojuangco had indeed utilized public funds to acquire UCPB, which the government sequestered in 1986.