Romero’s alma mater ordered foreclosed; Litton gets campus
The graduate school that counts on party-list representative Mikee Romero as its most famous alumnus has been ordered foreclosed.
In a decision released last week, the Supreme Court reinstated a 2004 order by the Metropolitan Trial Court of Manila to enforce the levy on execution of the Makati real property that houses the International Academy of Management and Economics, where Romero had obtained his PhD.
The foreclosure stemmed from the unpaid rent and accumulated interest charges incurred since 1980 by IAME founder and 1971 Constitutional Convention delegate Emmanuel “Noli” Santos.
It is a sad ending for Santos, a key ally of opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. who was appointed acting governor of Nueva Ecija and chief executive of the sequestered Channel 13 after the Edsa 1 revolt.
The case stemmed from an ejectment case filed by Litton & Co. against Santos, who had rented the Litton Apartments in Malate, but fought a running legal battle to dodge a P6-million judgment even as the court-mandated interest rate was piling up.
The high tribunal said that Santos, a lawyer, used the IAME “to defeat judicial processes and to evade his obligation to Litton” when he acquired a Makati property in 1979 under the IAME name, even when the school was only organized in 1985.
The high tribunal also noted that Santos even had the IAME building along Metropolitan Avenue in Makati named “Noli Santos International Tower.”
“It may be possible for this court to recommend that Litton run after the other properties of Santos that could satisfy the money judgment – first personal, then other real properties other than that of the school,” said the ponente, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno.
“However, if we allow this, we frustrate the decadesold yet valid MeTC judgment which levied on the real property now titled under the name of the school,” she said. “Moreover, this court will unwittingly condone the action of Santos in hiding all these years behind the corporate form to evade paying his obligation.”
IAME itself had stopped its college and graduate courses after another running battle with the Commission on Higher Education, which had classified the school as substandard.
IAME is now reduced to offering certificate courses and, according to its Facebook account, a “BS Nursing course at the newly acquired nursing school – The Makati Medical Center College.”
It was not immediately clear what Litton intends to do with the four-story IAME building. The company, once an industry leader in textiles, also owns the 3.2-hectare Mandala Park in Mandaluyong. The Japanese-funded project to treat Parañaque’s raw sewage before being dumped into the Manila Bay has gotten stuck at the City Hall.
Supposed to have been finished by end-2017, a onekilometer segment of sewage pipes to connect the treated waste from the new treatment plant in Sucat to the Kaybuboy Creek near the famous Air Force One massage parlor could not be laid.
According to the grapevine, no less than Mayor Edwin Olivarez was objecting to the proposal, fearing that the one-kilometer open-cut excavation of the congested-Sucat Road would cause traffic gridlock even up to NAIA Terminal 1.
Instead, Olivarez wants the treated sewage to be dumped at Malabon Creek, right behind the treatment plant at SM Sucat, thereby eliminating altogether tearing up
and excavating the one-kilometer stretch of Sucat Avenue. There is a problem with the Olivarez plan, though. The alternative Malabon Creek is shallower and, given the siltation and the garbage being thrown into the creek, the nightmare scenario of the wastewater backing up especially during the rainy season and flooding the sewage plant and the nearby SM mall could likely happen.
There is another, but more expensive engineering solution to minimize traffic disturbance, and that is to excavate by tunneling through Sucat Avenue to burrow the sewage pipes.
But then another question now arises, and one that has no willing takers – who will pay for the project alteration?
Parañaque sewer runs into mayoral blockage Heard through the grapevine
Despite, or probably because of, the intercession of lawyer Manuel Lazaro, corporate lawyer Perry Pe has resigned the presidency of the Manila Golf Club following a policy disagreement with the group of former Leyte congressman and previous MGC president Ferdinand Martin Romualdez.
The vice president, George Blaylock of Diamond Motors, inexplicably also resigned, prompting the rest of the board to offer the club presidency, with only two months left before the next elections, to director Ricardo “Ritchie” Garcia.