Cops raid Tarlac firm selling fake products
MALOLOS City—If all expectations turn out well for the plebiscite scheduled this Saturday (Dec. 17), the historic province of Bulacan will have a fourth component city, to be officially known as Baliwag City.
With a population of 168,470 as of the 2020 census, way above the threshold of 150, 000 requirement under the law, Baliwag has 27 barangays and has become a growth center east of the provincial capitol here with its vast land area of some 45 square kilometers.
The plebiscite was supposed to be scheduled for January 14 next year, but the Comelec approved a petition of Baliwag Mayor Ferdie Estrella to move the plebiscite to an earlier date in lieu of the postponement of the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections.
The basis of the Dec. 17 plebiscite was RA 11929, or the law passed last July 29 converting the municipality of Baliwag to a city.
Comelec Resolution No. 10851 promulgated on Nov. 8, set the information and campaign period from Nov. 17 to Dec. 15.
A POLICE raid on a Tarlac-based trading company dealing in office and school supplies reportedly yielded a huge cache of counterfeit Epson products.
Armed with a search warrant against the RYJEL Office and School Supplie, the raiders found several boxes of fake products bearing unauthorized reproductions of the Epson trademark and designs.
Lawyer Jonathan Selvasegaram, head of the Southeast Asia division of React, a global not-forprofit organization that has been fighting the counterfeit trade for more than 30 years. Said they have been assisting Epson, which has a Philippine office, in its campaign against counterfeit goods.
“The Philippines is an important market for Epson,” said Hideo Shimamura, Epson manager in charge of the company’s intellectual property in Southeast Asia
“Unfortunately, the trade in counterfeit Epson ink bottles has been growing over the last couple of years. Trading of fake Epson products done online has become particularly serious and is hurting the business of shops selling genuine ink products,” he added.
Alerted by the Tarlac trading company’s suspicious activities online, Shimamura’s Singapore-based office asked Philippine authorities, to look into the matter.
“We commend the raiding team for the swift action against an errant online seller,” Selvasegaram said. The raiding team, he added, found boxes that contained 823 bottles of counterfeit Epson printer inks and 44 fake Epson ribbon cartridges. There were also three empty boxes that carried the Epson label.