Bogus job offers in Spain send woman to prison

PROMISING nonexistent jobs in Spain to aspiring overseas workers through a bogus manpower company earned a businesswoman a life sentence after a Quezon City judge found her guilty on Monday of large scale illegal recruitment amounting to economic sabotage.

Imelda Pamintuan-Reluya, president of JC Irene International Manpower Agency Inc., was also ordered to pay over P500,000 in actual, exemplary and moral damages to the four people she duped between August 2007 and February 2008.

Assisting Judge Genie Gapas-Agbada of the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 221 said that Reluya used her Cubao-based company which is not registered with the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration to recruit people for overseas jobs.

The four victims testified that they paid the accused over P300,000 in exchange for working as housekeepers and room boys in Spain.

The judge said in her decision that she found their testimonies highly credible as they positively identified Reluya as the person who recruited them, received their payments and issued them receipts bearing the names of two companies—JC Irene International Manpower Agency Inc. and JC Irene Corp., a garments firm.

Reluya, on the other hand, denied transacting business with the victims, saying she was on leave from JC Irene Corp. at the time the alleged recruitment took place. She also said that during that time, she was not working for the manpower agency.

Agbada, however, said that previous Supreme Court rulings had cited that “positive testimony [was] stronger than negative testimony.” She added that Reluya could not claim to have nothing to do with the manpower agency since she had admitted to one of the private-complainants that she owned the firm and that the two were basically one and the same.