Bingbong Crisologo gets last laugh on Vivienne Tan, thanks to Sereno doctrine
Quezon City Rep. Vincent “Bingbong” Crisologo may be pushing for the impeachment of Ma. Lourdes Sereno, but he owes the country’s first female chief justice some gratitude for her doctrine that helped doom the 2010 candidacy of his congressional opponent, billionaire heiress Vivienne Tan.
According to a decision made public last week, the Supreme Court’s Third Division, citing a previous Sereno ruling, denied the certiorari petition filed by the Lucio Tan daughter against Crisologo and the Court of Appeals. Shorn of legalese, the high tribunal In fighting form: Crisologo said that Tan was not a Filipino citizen when she registered as a voter on Nov. 16, 2009 since she only filed a petition to reacquire her citizenship two weeks after, on Dec. 1, 2009 to be exact.
Tan, who became a naturalized US citizen in 1993, had actually been ordered struck out of the 2010 voters’ list by Metropolitan Trial Court Judge Augustus Diaz when the billionaire’s daughter decided to contest Crisologo, then running for his third term, in the first of the former capital city.
The MTC ruling was reversed by Quezon City Regional Trial Court Judge Henri Jean-Paul Inting, now a CA justice, only to be reversed by the appellate court in favor of Crisologo a little over two weeks before the elections.
Despite vowing to fight all the way to the Supreme Court, Tan lost heavily in the May 10, 2010 elections, taking only less than 24 percent of the votes against Crisologo nearly 61 percent.
“The renunciation of foreign citizenship is not a hollow act that can simply be professed at any time, only to be violated the next day,” said SC Associate Justice Samuel Martires, quoting Sereno in the Maquiling v. Comelec case. “It requires an absolute and perpetual renunciation of the foreign citizenship and a full divestment of all civil and political rights granted by the foreign country which granted the citizenship.”
Tan’s claim that RA 9225, the 2003 law allowing dual citizenship, gave retroactive effect to Filipinos who had lost Philippine citizenship would cause confusion as to what Section 3 of that law actually stipulated, said Martires.
Section 3 of RA 9225 states: “Natural-born citizens by reason of their naturalization as citizens of a foreign country are hereby deemed to have reacquired Philippine citizenship upon taking the oath of allegiance to the Republic.”
However, when Tan renounced her Filipino citizenship, RA 9225 was not yet enacted, and, therefore, Commonwealth Act 63 was the applicable law in her case, the justice said.
Under that pre-World War II law, both the renunciation of Philippine citizenship and the acquisition of a new citizenship in a foreign country through naturalization are grounds to lose Philippine citizenship.
That said, RA 9225 actually contains no provision stating that it may be applied retroactively as regards natural-born citizens who became naturalized citizens of a foreign country, Martires clarified.
“Moreover, to consider that the reacquisition of Philippine citizenship (before RA 9225) retroacts to the date it was lost would result in an absurd scenario where a Filipino would still be condistrict sidered a Philippine citizen when in fact he had already renounced his citizenship,” he added.
To prevent legal confusion, “if the words of the statute are susceptible to more than one meaning, the absurdity of the result of one construction is a strong argument against its adoption and in favor of such sensible interpretation as would avoid such result,” Martires said, quoting a 1921 Supreme Court ruling.
Incidentally, the main lawyer of Tan at that time that advanced her erroneous theory is now acting Comelec chairman Christian Robert Lim.
The Presidential Commission on Good Government has submitted a damning report on the alleged financial finaglings of its former chairman, Andres Bautista, a copy of which is now in the hands of Ombudsman and travel companion Conchita Carpio-Morales.
E-mail: moneygoround.manila@yahoo.com