Thin buffer

Thousands of dirt poor coconut farmers went to their graves before the Supreme Court unanimously ruled Tuesday: Stocks that tycoon Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco Jr. claims as “commission”, in the coco levy scam, belongs to the government. They’re for farmers from whom they were extorted.

The ruling zeroes in on stocks that Cojuangco would pocket after he negotiated purchase of First United Bank by Philippine Coconut Authority. FUB shingle’s was repainted United Coconut Planters Bank. It monopolized deposit of levy funds thru Ferdinand Marcos’ Presidential Decree 276.

That decreed “coco levies” were owned by cronies “in their private capacities.” Taxes became individual loot, by the stroke of a dictator’s pen. If PD 276 is not scrubbed as unconstitutional, “Marcos found a legal and valid way to steal,” wrote then columnist Antonio Carpio. As Supreme Court justice today, Carpio finds himself vindicated, albeit fragment by troubled fragment.

The Serreno Court, ruled that Cojuangco received public assets in UCPB shares. They were valued P10.8 million in 1975, paid by coco levy funds.” Cojuangco admitted PCA picked up the tab for the 72-percent option shares. It affirmed the Sandiganbayan order to nullify transfer to Cojuangco.

Cojuangco “cannot stand to benefit by receiving, in his private capacity, 7.2 percent of FUB shares.” ( That’d violate) “ the constitutional caveat that public funds can only be used for public purpose.” the court added. Basta. No further reconsideration. That’s final.

“We are not final because we are infallible,” US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once wrote.. “But (we are) infallible only because we are final.” But that is what the Corona Supreme Court repeatedly ignored in the coco levy case. It flip-flopped four times on the coco levy case after the initial “final” ruling.

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Government plans to sell the P14.4 billion worth sequestered shares in UCPB, says Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. President Valentin Araneta. Proceeds will go to a trust fund that the government will put up for coconut farmers. After the Marcos regime fleeced UCPB, government had to rescue it with the bank with a P20-billion loan that still has to run until 2018.

In August 1998, Ricardo Cardinal Vidal presented to President Joseph Estrada a Catholic Bishops-Businessmen’s Conference memo.. “Abuse of state power” wrung those monies from small, impoverished coconut farmers, it said. They should be returned.

Erap made noises about helping. But just before People Power booted him out, he signed Executive Orders 313 and 315. “Erap delivered the levy— estimated at over P100 billion then —to cronies,” Sun Star noted. “It was grand larceny that needed ever-larger doses of hypocrisy.”

Flash back to the brutal November 2003 teetering-on-the-edge constitutional crisis. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Hilario Davide, earlier ruled that the coconut levy were public funds. A furious Cojuangco then unleashed a “Brat Pack” of Nationalist People’s Coalition congressmen to impeach Davide.

Davide defied gangland culture “so often he became a big threat, “Inquirer’s Randy David observed. “Now, Davide is being taught a lesson, by heirs of those who always imagined themselves to be the real lords in this little corner of the world.” — the Brat Pack.

“Is this a coalition of cretins?,” snapped Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. They initiated an impeachment on the unimpeachable ground of failure to give the cost-of-living allowance. “The conundrum of the House is: how to climb, out of the shit hole in which a third of its members descended with such stealth…” The House rejected the bid.

Shares owned by 14 companies, bought with the levy, are “owned by government,” Justice Teresita Leonardo de Castro and the Sandiganbayan ruled in May 2004. “[They are] held in trust for all coconut farmers.”

Indeed “coconut levy funds are prima facie public funds,” the Supreme Court unequivocally stated for the first time in “Republic vs. Cocofed.” Penned by then Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban, the decision allowed sequestered shares to be voted by the PCGG, “pending the final determination of who were their legal owners.” Thus, Cojuangco surrendered control of a fleeced UCPB to the government.

Sure, coco levies were dipped into for the purchase of SMC shares, said the Corona Supreme Court Nonetheless, Cojuangco “legally acquired the 20 percent block,” He pocketed 16.2 million SMC shares, jacking up his stake in the corporation to P37 billion,

That’s “the joke of the century,” snapped then Justice Conchita Carpio Morales. Cojuangco “used for his personal benefit the very same funds entrusted to him,” Morales’ dissenting opinion states. “[These] were released to him through illegal and improper machination of loan transactions. [His] contravention of corporation laws … indicates a clear violation of fiduciary duty…”

Then, Associate, now Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno agreed. Her scathing dissent said: Cojuangco’s stake in SMC was “built on the sweat of coconut farmers…By a scheme of “corporate layering and multi-level loan transactions,” he diverted public funds. Chief Justice Renato Corona, meanwhile, has been impeached.

“Men of good will are often all that is between us and the devil”, a proverb says. Indeed, reforms by President Benigno Aquino and a renewed Supreme Court would reduce premature graves for robbed coconut planters.

They should. Levy-impoverished farmers “are not a race of other creatures bound on other journeys,” to crib a line from Charles Dickens. “They are our fellow travelers to the grave.”