Supreme Court asked to void UP land ruling

MANILA, Philippines - Who really owns the 78-hectare land covering the University of the Philippines – Ayala Land Techno Hub along Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City?

The Supreme Court (SC) was asked Thursday to again rule on this property dispute by petitioners Jorge Chin and Renato Mallari and to annul its resolution that granted the land to UP.

The petitioners, whose ownership on the property was upheld in February 2000 but taken back in November 2003 by the same division of the High Court, decried what they described as “extrinsic fraud and grave injustice” in the revocation of their titles.

In a 63-page petition obtained by The STAR, Chin and Mallari argued that the 2003 resolution of the SC Special First Division should be declared void because the 2000 decision was already final and executory.

In its 2000 decision, justices of the SC division unanimously granted ownership of the contested land to Chin and Mallari, who bought their titles from the heirs of Antonio Pael, and junked the claim of Pedro Destura, who claimed he bought the property from a Pael family representative. But two years later, the SC granted the property to UP.

The turnaround was brought about when the SC remanded the case to the CA in December 2001 to resolve which title – that of the petitioners or that of the university – overlapped the property of the other.

The CA, in its July 2003 report to the SC, upheld the findings of the verification and relocation survey conducted by Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) showing that properties under the title of UP (Transfer Certificate of Title 9462) overlapped the properties of Chin and Mallari (TCTs 52928 and 52929). It was also found that the titles of the petitioners were issued in 1938 while those of UP in 1949, or 11 years later.

But the SC division, according to petitioners, had “misapprehended” the findings of the DENR and CA and was misled by UP in ruling that the titles of Chin and Mallari overlapped those of the state university.

Lawyer Prospero Anave, representing Chin and Mallari, said the SC “should not have reversed the CA report” because the High Court “is not a trier of facts.”

“Factual matters cannot be inquired into by the Supreme Court in an appeal for certiorari – the Court can no longer be tasked to go over the proofs presented by the parties and analyze, assess and weigh them to ascertain if the trial court and the appellate court were correct in according superior credit to this or that piece of evidence of one party or the other,” he said.

Anave argued that the High Court division relied solely on the interpretation of UP on the results of the DENR survey without taking into consideration the clarification issued by their reviewer, DENR assistant regional executive director for legal services Rogelio Tiongson, who said it was the property of UP that overlapped the property of petitioners.

The 2003 SC resolution was penned by Chief Justice Reynato Puno, then a member of the special first division. Then Chief Justice and division chair Hilario Davide Jr. and Associate Justice Ma. Alicia Austria Martinez, who had just retired from the judiciary last Thursday, concurred with the majority ruling.

Associate Justice Consuelo Ynares–Santiago and retired Associate Justice Adolf Azcuna dissented with the resolution.

In her 12-page opinion, Santiago stressed that the “findings of fact of the Court of Appeals are generally final and conclusive and cannot be reviewed by this Court, unless they appear to be based on speculation, surmises or conjectures or when these are not based on substantial evidence.”

“It appeared that UP’s claim of ownership over the subject properties is not supported by clear, competent and substantial evidence,” she said.

The first civil case was filed by Roberto Pael in 1981 against UP after his family noticed that the state university had started building a perimeter fence in its property. Pael wanted a Quezon City court to nullify UP’s TCT 9462, its land title before it was divided into five titles, and for UP to pay for damages.

Quezon City Regional Trial Court Judge Lucas Bersamin handed down a decision on Jan. 24, 1994, ordering the Register of Deeds of Quezon City to cancel the titles of Chin and Mallari and reinstate the title of the Paels under TCT 36048.

Mallari and Chin then appealed to the Court of Appeals, which reversed the decision of the lower court. UP filed a motion for intervention, which the SC granted. The same motion by the Paels was denied on the grounds that they had made a deed of sale with Mallari and Chin.

The Paels then filed a supplemental motion for reconsideration before the SC, but the petition was denied for lack of merit in the SC’s 2001 resolution.