Ombudsman hits Lani for session hall closure

Taguig City Mayor Lani Cayetano PHOTO BY RICHARD A. REYES

For closing the city council’s session hall in August 2010, “an act of hostility” that saw local lawmakers holding their gathering on the stairway, Taguig Mayor Lani Cayetano is facing criminal charges in the Sandiganbayan.

The Office of the Ombudsman on Thursday ordered the indictment of Cayetano and City Administrator Jose Montales for violating the Revised Penal Code and the Local Government Code when they had the session hall “padlocked” on the pretext that the mayor was reorganizing City Hall offices.

The closure happened three months after the wife of Sen. Alan Cayetano was elected to her first term as mayor, succeeding Freddie Tiñga. She was the lone winner from the local ticket of the Nacionalista Party, while the elected vice mayor, George Elias, and all the winning councilors were from the rival party, Kilusang Diwa ng Taguig.

The antigraft body said it was unlawful for Cayetano and Montales to “prevent or tend to prevent the meetings of local legislative bodies” by using “force or fraud.”

“The (councilors) underscored the padlocking of the session hall as an act of hostility, premeditated and executed with undue haste, affording no prior consultation and no prior notice,” the
Ombudsman said in a statement.

Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales said the respondents violated the Local Government Code provision stating that the authority of local chief executives “to assign and allocate office spaces must be exercised for the purpose of promoting efficient and economical governance.”

“The exercise of any power, whether express or implied, must be rational. The exercise necessarily precludes any arbitrariness or abuse,” Morales said. She noted that the closure forced the councilors to use a “small room” in the city auditorium and hold their maiden session “on the staircase of the City Hall.”

The council held their succeeding 14 sessions in several venues within and outside City Hall.

The Ombudsman dismissed the mayor’s defense that the closure was part of a “reengineering and reorganizational plan.”

Morales added: “The documentary evidence, as well as respondents’ own admissions, belied their claim that any [such] plan with respect to city hall offices actually existed.”

Cayetano on Thursday said she was surprised because the complaint stemming from the closure—“filed by people who were not my allies at the time”—was supposedly dismissed in 2011.

There were 17 complainants against Cayetano back then: Councilors Gamaliel San Pedro, Jaime Labampa, Baby Gloria Valenzuela de Mesa, Carlito Ogalinola, Rodil Marcelino, Baltazar Mariategue, Roderick Carlos Papa, Ronnette Franco, Aurelio Paulo Bartolome, Ricardo Jordan, Erwin Manalili, Edwin Eron, Jeffrey Morales, Milagros Valencia, Michelle Ann Gonzales, Estella Gasgonia, and Vice Mayor Elias, the Inquirer learned.

When the complaint was dismissed in 2011, only three of the 17 complainants filed motions to revive it, namely Gonzales, Valencia and Morales.

“I explained clearly that I never stopped the council from conducting regular sessions,” Cayetano told a press conference at the City Hall extension office in Bonifacio Global City.

When she took over in 2010, she found that the spaces beside City Hall had been sold by the previous administration, that’s why the offices once located there needed new sites, she said.

She insisted that the council and other units related to the mayor’s office were duly notified about the “reorganization and reassignment” of offices.

“I was really surprised because something like this was revived. But we will face this, we will exhaust all legal remedies and we will not allow services to be disrupted,” she said.