Big Quezon City land row heats up

Homeowners of a subdivision in Quezon City are questioning decisions of a local court transferring ownership of a 24-hectare prime property to a 75-year-old man purportedly holding a spurious title.

The court’s decisions threaten to evict homeowners of several middle-class subdivisions, a school, a seminary, businesses, a popular wedding venue and a chapel straddled by the property near busy Visayas Avenue.

Wilfredo S. Torres has managed to convince Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 224 that the property was legally owned by his mother.

The 23.7-hectare property is divided into seven lots, and is covered by seven transfer certificates of title (TCTs), all within the Piedad Estate.

Furious residents of K-Ville Townhomes, a two-hectare subdivision inside Sanville Subdivision, filed a petition on Monday in the Court of Appeals to nullify the RTC rulings.

“This case has graphically displayed that the judiciary may have been wittingly or unwittingly victimized or conned by slick operators of a criminal syndicate who have put up a moro-moro in court,” they said.

The Inquirer was furnished a copy of their petition.

Quoting government agents, the residents described Torres as a “notorious hustler who has had a skein of syndicated operations relative to brazen acts of land-grabbing” in Quezon City, other parts of Metro Manila and Rizal province.

“As to why this Wilfredo S. Torres has persisted with his despicable acts of land-grabbing up to now, while easily flouting the law and continuing with seeming impunity in his brazen act of assaulting the citadel of the indefeasibility [not liable to being voided] of the Torrens title system, is a $64 question,” they said.

Past claim on UP

Sorsogon Rep. Salvador Escudero, a homeowner in Sanville 1, laughed off Torres’ claim over the subdivision.

“If we receive a notice, I suggest that he be taken to the mental hospital. When I was still in UP (University of the Philippines), he was claiming a portion of UP,” Escudero said by phone.

The seven titles comprising the 24-ha property cover Sanville 1, 2, 3 and 4 subdivisions; K-Square and Metro Heights subdivisions, Arfel Homes, Sadel Court; wedding venue Fernwood Gardens, including the St. Francis Chapel and a portion of Claret Seminary, all in Barangay Culiat; and the Maria Montessori School of Quezon City and Wilcon Builders outlet on Visayas Avenue. (See map.)

Wally Young, lawyer of the homeowners, believes that Torres was out to con the homeowners and extort money from them.

“It’s actually extortion legitimized by a court decree,” Young, himself a homeowner of K-Ville, said in an interview.

Leachon, Villordon

Then Judge Emilio Leachon of RTC Branch 224 ordered the reconveyance of the property to Torres in 1997 and the reconstitution of the TCTs allegedly burned in a huge fire that destroyed records at the Quezon City Hall in 1988.

His successor, Judge Tita Marilyn Payoyo-Villordon, ordered the issuance of new TCTs in Torres’ name in 2006. In May this year, she ordered the city assessor’s office to transfer tax declarations covered by the new TCTs in Torres’ name.

The homeowners of K-Ville are unit owners or registered owners of town-home units with titles to their property whose residential lots are encompassed by the lot titled in Torres’ name.

Fraud

In their petition, the residents argued that the decisions should be nullified because these were attended by “extrinsic fraud.”

There was extrinsic fraud because Villordon “subtly dissuaded” the city assessor’s office from notifying them of her May 26 order, the homeowners said.

The judge did this by specifying in her order that the new tax declarations be issued to Torres without any annotation, the residents said.

“It was double-barreled as the same court order and would give respondent Wilfredo S. Torres the choice opportunity to pass off his newly acquired tax declarations as without any defect or encumbrance,” the homeowners said.

Were it not for the city assessor’s “providential” move to notify them of the judge’s order, they would have been turned into the “proverbial sitting ducks who could be hit and prejudiced one by one like the easy targets in a carnival’s shooting joust,” they said.

K-Ville sits on a two-hectare land that is part of Lot  No. 648 covered by TCT No. 004-2011004285, one of the seven new titles issued to Torres by the register of deeds office on Villordon’s 2010 order.

Lack of jurisdiction

The K-Ville homeowners further argued that RTC Branch 224 lacked jurisdiction.

They pointed out that they were not parties to the case filed by Torres against spouses Manuel and Rosalina Aliño, Investment Underwriter Corp. of the Philippines and the register of deeds in 1990 or in the petition for reconstitution of seven TCTs in 2000.

The court ruled on these cases in 1996 and 2006, respectively, in favor of Torres.

“Respondent RTC through Judge Villordon ought to have known being a magistrate of the respondent RTC that these affected residential lot owners numbering 116 for the K-Ville Project alone…, who have not been served their respective summonses, cannot be the subject of an execution of the RTC decisions,” the homeowners said.

Worse, the homeowners pointed out that Villordon treated Torres’ omnibus motion in 2010 as a petition for the revival of the 1996/1997 judgment “without any basis in law or in fact.”

They believed that the judge did this because she was aware that the period to file a motion to revive a judgment (which lapses in five years) or the period to file a new action to revive a judgment (which lapses in 10 years) had been prescribed.

“Faced with such a seeming Gordian knot, Judge Villordon … resolved the matter by cavalierly treating the motion as an action/petition for revival of judgment,” the homeowners said.

By doing so, the judge appropriated the case to her branch, forgot to have it reraffled and stamped with a new docket number, and failed to have Torres pay new docket fees, the homeowners said.

Spurious mother title

More important, Young argued that the mother title from which Torres’ titles had emanated was spurious, quoting a report from the Land Registration Authority (LRA).

“The title from which all these emanated is a false title,” he said.

Torres’ mother, Dominga Roxas Sumulong, filed for the administrative reconstitution of TCT No. 56809 in the 1960s using a photocopy of a purported owner’s duplicate of the title as basis, according to the LRA.

The Land Registration Commission allowed the reconstitution, and the Quezon City Register of Deeds proceeded to do this and issued TCT No. (56809) 113005 in the name of Sumulong, who was married to Teodorico Torres.

Sumulong supposedly sold lots covered by the title to the Aliño couple. In 1990, Torres moved for the annulment of the sale since the couple managed to pay only P290,000 but not the P4-million balance.

Forgery

A verifications committee of the LRA, however, discovered that the owner’s duplicate copy presented by Sumulong was a forged title and concluded that the title reconstituted from it was “irregularly issued.”

“The origin being spurious, all the titles that emanated therefrom are likewise spurious,” LRA Deputy Administrator Robert Leyretana said in an Aug. 8 memorandum, a copy of which was furnished the Inquirer.

Seeking a TRO

In their petition, the homeowners prayed for a temporary restraining order and/or a writ for preliminary injunction.

Unless these were issued, they warned of “bloodshed as respondent Torres together with his army of goons has already started implementing the writ of possession… in an area about a kilometer from the homes of the petitioners,” they said.

The homeowners asserted that they had a clear legal right anchored on the “indefeasibility” of the Torrens Title system which governs the country’s land titling system.

Torres’ lawyer

Sought for comment, Torres’ lawyer, Cornelio Aldon, maintained that his client’s land title was genuine and not spurious.

In an interview, Aldon pointed out that Torres inherited the title from his mother.

“He just inherited it and the title was issued by the Land Registration Authority that only proves the title is genuine,” the lawyer said on Friday.

Aldon said he had yet to see a copy of the homeowners’ petition filed in the Court of Appeals.

The lawyer, however, said he had somehow “expected” the move to appeal Villordon’s decision. “We have anticipated that they (the homeowners) would be filing an appeal like this,” Aldon said.

Named respondents in the petition were Villordon and Torres.

Aldon, speaking for his client, said the petition was likely asking for a review of the court’s jurisdiction.

“Once we receive a copy of the petition, then we will answer it,” he added. With a report from Julie M. Aurelio