Malabon loses another councilor

Malabon lost another member of the city council after the Ombudsman affirmed an earlier decision to dismiss Councilor Venancio Sevilla from service for falsifying government records and lying.

The Ombudsman also ordered Sevilla to cease and desist from holding public office. He was stripped of his privileges such as retirement benefits, the right to run for any public office and employment in government offices.

Sevilla’s dismissal came after the Ombudsman’s Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) approved the Administrative Adjudication Bureau’s decision last June 25 denying his appeal to a March 26 dismissal.

The case was filed against Sevilla by former Councilors Rogelio Yanga and Lucio Santos, who themselves were asked to step down by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) due to an error by the poll body. The Comelec, in an en banc decision, affirmed its Sept. 6, 2001 ruling that the seventh seat in the two districts held by Yanga and Santos was null and void. The poll body also subsequently nullified the duo’s proclamation as elected councilors in the May 14 polls.

Yanga and Santos, in their petition, claimed that Sevilla lied on two occasions when he submitted his personal data sheet (PDS) to the Office of the Mayor. When asked in the same PDS whether he had a pending criminal case, Sevilla allegedly answered "no" when he had an ongoing criminal case for assault upon an agent of authority before Branch 55 of the Malabon Metropolitan Trial Court (MTC).

Sevilla allegedly lied anew when he answered in the negative to the question whether he had been a candidate in a national or local election. He ran for councilor of Malabon in 1992 and 1995 and for vice mayor in 1998, and for councilor again in the May 14 polls.

Sevilla, for his part, denied the lies were deliberate. He claimed that he had no intention to conceal the fact that he ran for office.

The error, he said, may have arisen as a result of his office workload, forcing him to rely on his staff to prepare the PDS, which he signed without reading.