SC hands columnist monetary relief in battle with Enrile
The Supreme Court has given pro-PNoy advertising executive Yolanda Villanueva-Ong financial wiggle room in her legal battle with former Senate president Juan Ponce Enrile.
The high tribunal’s First Division, chaired by Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, has overturned the Court of Appeals and Pasay Regional Trial Court decisions that required Ong to pay the docket fees in connection with her P88-million counterclaim against Enrile’s P31-million libel complaint against her.
Enrile’s damage suit stemmed from an October 2012 column where Ong, then writing for the Philippine Star, had savaged Enrile’s political history.
The Supreme Court agreed with Ong that her counterclaims were “compulsory in nature”, having arisen from Enrile’s filing of a complaint for damages and, therefore, exempt from payment of docket fees as mandated under a 2009 SC circular.
“The counterclaim is so intertwined with the main case that it is incapable of proceeding independently,” said the ponente, Associate Justice Noel Tijam, quoting a previous SC ruling.
Tijam, incidentally, is a San Beda law classmate of President Duterte and in the second Duterte appointee to the Supreme Court after Samuel Martires.
Ong, on the other hand, had acted as campaign manager for Leni Robredo in the 2016 elections after retiring as chief executive of Campaigns & Grey, the ad agency she founded.
Ong is represented by La Salle law dean Jose Manuel Diokno, who also happens to be one of the defense counsel of Sereno in the ongoing impeachment complaint.
Released last week, the high court ruling showed that Associate Justice Teresita Leonardo-De Castro, who had testified against Sereno in the House hearings, voted in favor of Ong, along with justices Mariano del Castillo and Francis Jardeleza.
Money talks
• The financial hot streak of Jollibee chief marketing officer Daniel Rafael Ramon Gomez III that began before the New Year holidays continues. “Dondi”, as close friends call the Jollibee executive, last week netted about P45 million after flipping 250,000 Jollibee shares he had received as stock incentive.
Between Dec. 29 and Jan. 16, Dondi also disposed a total of 234,000 Jollibee shares following the same scheme.
• The latest application of Ginebra San Miguel to trademark the word “ginebra” has been rejected by the Intellectual Property Office, with director general Ricardo Blancaflor agreeing with his legal department that the San Miguel subsidiary needed to “disclaim” the word, being a generic Spanish term for gin.
Heard through the grapevine
The board of the Manila Golf Club was set to meet last night to resolve what may diplomatically be termed as chemistry issues between president Perry Pe and the group of former Leyte congressman and previous MGC president Ferdinand Martin Romualdez.