Cebu clan lays claim to hospital lot

CEBU CITY — Heirs of the Cabarrubias family are now laying a claim to a property now occupied by the Don Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center.

The heirs have filed an action with the Office of the Ombudsman to nullify the city government’s ownership of the property.

The Cabarrubiases have accused owners of the then Southern Islands Hospital of fabricating documents that would make it appear that they owned the 6,349-square-meter property where the Don Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center now stands.

The heirs said the property was once friar land under the Philippine Commission Act of 1920 that Bibiana Cabarrubias had bought.

In the succeeding years, the Cabarrubias heirs said there was never any contract that was entered into between the Southern Islands Hospital and Bibiana that might prove that there was a deed of sale, adjudication, donation, assignment or conveyance of the property.

Showing there was falsification, the heirs alleged that title entries were incomplete and did not reflect the original certificate of title numbers.

They also alleged that the dates of survey and approval and signatures of these documents were all fabricated.

They said that when Bibiana died on June 12, 1945, it was the same year that Southern Islands made a declaration of the real property to the city government, claiming the annotation on the property was reportedly lost.

In a move to repossess the property, the Cabarrubiases recently filed an action against counsel Felixberto Aliño, the register of deeds, the Land Registration Authority, the office of the regional registrar and the justice department’s office in Cebu City to nullify Southern Islands’ ownership of the property.

The heirs further asked the court to investigate the parties involved in the alleged falsification of public documents.

The Ombudsman ordered Aliño and the register of deeds to produce certification that would verify Southern Islands’ ownership of the property, both said the records have been lost. — Freeman News Service