Taking advantage of home dreamers

In good economic times or in bad, Filipinos continue to invest in that dream house, no matter how small. Squatter syndicates know this only too well, and make big money preying on dreamers.

One such syndicate recently duped dozens of lot buyers in Taguig and Makati of millions of pesos. Making P10,000-P50,000 downpayments on lots along C-5 Road near Fort Bonifacio, the buyers never suspected the titles were fake. The company they dealt with had a charming name they had no reason to doubt: Pinagkamaligan Indo-Agro Development Corp. (Piadeco). Little did they know it was operating an old modus that has fooled hundreds of others in the past decade.

Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council chairman Michael Defensor and Interior Secretary Jose Lina discovered the fraud last week and filed charges against Willy Sumulong Torres and cohorts. Torres had made it look like he owns 119 hectares of land in and around the Fort by virtue of a deed of donation. Sending out Piadeco agents to sell lots in Palar. Wildcat and ISG Villages in Southside, he enjoined buyers to build shell houses within two months or else forfeit their titles. The victims complied, sinking life savings on walls and downpayments. It was a ploy to make them scrounge around for cash in a rush. They were also asked to sign and notarize deeds of sale to make everything look legal. Torres then issued them certificates of occupancy, making them believe they were now proud owners of the lots for which they will pay Piadeco at easy terms.

The dream turned into a nightmare. The buyers found out that the government had declared the 119-hectare "Piadeco estate" in 2002 as a socialized housing site. Some lots were about to be awarded to qualified low-income applicants when authorities got wind of Piadeco’s scam. Defensor and Lina sued Torres and Piadeco agents for syndicated estafa, falsification of public documents, and professional squatting. The buyers will have to demolish their structures, yet have no way to get their money back. Torres and company have gone into hiding.

Torres’s is not the only big-time squatting gang in the crosshairs of authorities. The National Police directorate for investigation has identified four others: the Tallano-Madrigal-Acop group, Maysilo Estate, Rodriguez group, and Don Mariano San Pedro y Esteban Estate. The first used the landed Madrigal clan’s surname to dupe buyers. Maysilo bilked millions of pesos from victims in Rizal and Cavite. The last two have overlapping land titles, all fake, over large swaths of Central and Southern Luzon, including Metro Manila, Angat and Ipo dams, and the Sierra Madre range. They even claimed – and fought over in court – the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman.

"These criminals not only defraud Filipinos, but also pose a threat to the government’s land-titling system and to security of tenure envisioned by the urban development and housing program," Defensor says. "We will make sure they are apprehended and prosecuted."

The gangs have been sued time and again. The Supreme Court has decided several cases against them with finality. But their agents continue to operate. They have even learned to fight back, suing for harassment and graft any barangay official who stands in their way.

One modus is to first invite homeless provincial folk to occupy idle lands. Vulnerable targets, identified by cohorts in city hall registration offices, are lots whose owners are very ill or living in America. The syndicate then sells "usage rights" to the lots, usually to foreigners who are forbidden to own land or religious groups that do not bother to check land registries. The going rate: P50,000 or so per year. Victims find out they’ve been had only when they try to secure barangay clearances and city hall building permits. By that time, they not only have paid for a year or two in advance – depending on their gullibility – and relocation of the occupants.

A duo pulled the trick on lots within and adjacent to the La Mesa dam perimeter fence. They then grew bolder, fooling no less than military commissioned officers in a subdivision in Novaliches, Quezon City. Dazed and bitter, the officers ordered foot soldiers to repel government demolition teams with rifles and grenades before accepting the reality that they had to relinquish their lots to the real owners.

The same duo recently bilked a congregation of Korean Christians of almost a million pesos for a lot in Fairview on which they planned to build a chapel. They were the seventh group to fall prey over that small lot alone.

Barangay officials are on the alert, watching where gangsters would strike next. Syndicates have taken to wangling court restraining orders whenever the officials attempt to demolish the rising shanties of invited province folk.

Officials suspect that the Quezon City duo has amassed enough money to pay off judges. One judge restrained them from demolishing a dog-breeding farm cleared from the forest inside La Mesa dam. The "lessor" at first rented a house beside the dam, then punched a hole through the ten-foot-high fence and proceeded to cut down the trees. To this day the kennel operates under the syndicate’s legal ploy.

Defensor reports that the national task force against professional squatters and syndicates, which he chairs, has unearthed 6,597 fake land titles, of which 4,530 are being investigated and 2,067 have been sent to the Office of the Solicitor General for filing of court petitions. Chances are that syndicates will continue to use even only photocopies of those titles to sell and resell the lots several times over. The great Filipino dream of owning a home is simply too blinding for victims to exercise due diligence and verify the documents. Strangely taking the syndicate’s side, victims even hate articles like this, thinking that press exposés trigger land fraud investigations that will then force them to surrender their lots and accept bitter truth that all they’re holding are worthless pieces of paper.

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