MANILA, Philippines - The Court of Appeals (CA) has junked the bid of a Filipino doctor seeking to stop his extradition to the United States, where he is wanted for a $3-million fraud case.
In a four-page decision, the CA’s fourth division dismissed the petition for writ of habeas corpus filed by Dr. Eric Uy seeking his release from detention at National Bureau of Investigation (NBI).
Through lawyer Alan Paguia, Uy claimed that the extradition treaty between the Philippines and the US is unconstitutional because it was not ratified by a two-thirds vote of all the members of the Senate and therefore the arrest warrant issued against him by a Manila court was invalid for lack of jurisdiction.
The CA rejected this argument “for being patently without basis” as it upheld the extradition treaty “valid and binding.”
“A treaty… (is) considered valid and unconstitutional until declared otherwise by a final decision of the court. Until then, the courts are duty bound to enforce them,” stated the ruling penned by Associate Justice Amelita Tolentino.
Associate Justices Ramon Garcia and Danton Bueser concurred in this decision.
Uy is currently detained at the NBI after his arrest last February on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 1 on Aug. 28, 2006.
The Department of Justice, on behalf of the US government, filed a petition for Uy’s extradition after the US learned that Chan had entered and has a residential address in the Philippines.
On June 18, 2012, the Manila court had also denied the doctor’s motion for reconsideration seeking the withdrawal of the arrest warrant issued against him.
The 48-year-old Chan is wanted to stand trial in the Superior Court of the State of California for the Country of Los Angeles for conspiracy to commit a crime, grand theft and health care fraud for presenting false medical claims and collecting payments amounting to more than $3 million from the California Medi-Cal Program.
Two state courts in California separately issued warrants for his arrest in January 2000 and February 2003 following the filing of a complaint in 1996 accusing Chan and two others of operating the Green Cross Medical Clinic in Carson City, California, without a license or a medical service provider number.
Chan and his cohorts reportedly managed to defraud the US government by securing payments from the state’s Department of Health Services through its Medi-Cal program through the provider number of a licensed doctor they had hired, submitting $517,000 in claims for services not actually provided by the doctor.
But when the doctor deactivated her provider number, Chan and his cohorts allegedly opened another clinic, Evergreen Medical Clinic, in the same city in March 1997.
They hired another doctor, whose provider number they again allegedly used to make fraudulent claims of $1.7 million.
Subsequently, Chan allegedly put up West Coast Intermed Management using the said scheme and managed to defraud the US government of $900,000.
When the fraud was discovered in 1999, charges were filed against Chan and his co-accused.