When Globe Asiatique (GA) founder and housing magnate Delfin Lee was arrested by authorities inside a five-star hotel last March 5, he reportedly asked one of his police captors about the identity of the person who tipped them about his whereabouts.
Despite the fact that he is supposedly on the Philippine National Police’s most wanted list, Lee was completely baffled by his arrest. It is as if he did everything to forestall his arrest, except that somebody did him in. Was he in fact suspecting that someone in the Philippine National Police (PNP) sang like a canary?
Lee’s keen interest over the identity of the person who led the police team to handcuff him is quite curious in the sense that he is a fugitive. Because he is a subject of a police manhunt, his arrest is no longer surprising, unless the police was acting out the role of a pulis patola, or was giving him protection, which is what the public suspects.
In any case, with Lee asking who fingered him, the circumstance surrounding his arrest is “lawom” (Cebuano word meaning deep), according to my favorite wag. However, as more reports come out, they explain why Lee has eluded arrest since 2010, the year when the National Bureau of Investigation filed a case of syndicated estafa against the GA founder and 16 other people.
Delfin Lee is accused of defrauding the Home Mutual Development Fund of P7 billion in housing loans to fictitious Pag-IBIG Fund members in Globe Asiatique’s projects in Cavite and Pampanga from 2008 to 2011.
The case is being clouded by a Temporary Restraining Order issued by Pasig Regional Trial Court Judge Rolando Mislang stopping the Department of Justice (DOJ) from filing cases against Lee. The case stemmed from an earlier civil case filed by the government against the housing developer.
Another case that clouds the Lee controversy is the dismissal of cases against other respondents. The number of respondents had been trimmed down from 16 to five including Mr. Lee.
In October 2012, one of the respondents named Cristina Sagun, former head of GA’s documentation department was dropped from the case by the Court of Appeals. Exactly one year after Sagun escaped prosecution, the Appellate Court also dismissed the case of syndicated estafa against another co-accused, lawyer Alex Alvarez Jr., former Pag-IBIG Fund foreclosure manager.
That leaves only Lee, his son, Dexter and Christina Salagan, GA’s former chief accountant as corespondents in the criminal case. As an ordinary observer, I wondered how Sagun and Alvarez vindicated themselves minus a full-blown hearing on the syndicated estafa case.
The law requires that for the crime of syndicated estafa to be attained, at least five persons must be involved. With the dismissal of the case against Sagun and Alvarez, only three persons were named in the commission of the crime, a technicality that the camp of Lee used in his favor in and outside the courts of law.
Meanwhile, the rulings issued by the Court of Appeals (CA) 17th Division allowing the DOJ to proceed with the syndicated estafa case against Lee et al, was sustained by the Supreme Court in October 2012. But this becomes confusing when the Court of Appeals 10th Division ruled to recall the arrest warrant against Sagun.
Early this week, Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Roxas II loudly fumed after hearing Vice President Jejomar Binay say that a top politician intervened in the arrest of Lee. Although Secretary Roxas wasn’t named, he felt alluded to because of reports that the PNP echelon was protecting Lee. The PNP is under the supervision of the Department of Interior and Local Government.
In a broadcast interview, Roxas explained there is a certification within the PNP that Lee’s name is in the process of being removed. The process is supposedly in the context of a previous CA ruling that favored Lee. But the process was stopped because the DOJ is pursuing the case against Lee, according to Roxas.
This is interesting because when one says the delisting is being processed, the impression for the one seeking clearance is that the documents are in order and could mean that the needed document is soon to be had. Actually, Lee did not need any clearance from the PNP because for as long as the PNP continues the process of clearing him from the most wanted list, he gets a virtual reprieve. Most of all, there is a perception that the police is no longer trying to arrest him.
I can only say that Lee is very brilliant. Imagine impairing the work of the police on the basis of an application to be removed from the police most wanted list.
The PNP process, in addition to the criss-crossing rulings of the CA on the cases filed against Mr. Lee obscures the truth.
That is why many people think that even if the Supreme Court has paved the way for the prosecution of Lee, by ruling yesterday to stop the implementation of the CA decision that lifted the warrant of arrest issued against the GA founder, he could yet overcome this by finding another technicality or even become a whistle-blower by filing an application under the DOJ’s Witness Protection Program.
That would be the day.