CITY OF CAUAYAN—Tuguegarao City Mayor Jefferson Soriano said he was accepting a Sandiganbayan decision that ordered his preventive suspension for 90 days while it heard a graft complaint over the alleged anomalous purchase of rubber boats when he was deputy director general of the Philippine National Police in 2009.
“I have to heed [the order],” Soriano said although he has yet to receive a copy of the order that was issued on Feb. 19.
The decision addressed Soriano’s appeal to forego the 90-day suspension because, he said, he had just finished serving a 60-day preventive suspension ordered by the Office of the Ombudsman for another offense.
He had posted bail in September 2014, after he was implicated in the purchase of 75 commando rubber boats and 18 spare outboard motors worth P131.55 million that were reportedly “defective and functionally incompatible.”
The case was pursued when 41 rubber boats delivered by supplier Geneve SA Philippines could not be fitted with 60-horsepower engines supplied by another company, EnviroAire.
Soriano was implicated because he was the chair of the bids and awards committee at that time.
In its decision, the Sandiganbayan said Soriano failed to present any new arguments that would warrant the reversal of the court’s ruling issued on Nov. 2, 2015, that ordered a 90-day preventive suspension.
Soriano said he had served an excess of 130 days from Sept. 11, 2014, to April 16, 2015, when he was dismissed by the Ombudsman for grave misconduct for holding a city fair without the approval of the city council.
He appealed the Ombudsman’s ruling in the Court of Appeals, which found him guilty of simple misconduct and penalized him with a three-month suspension in 2015.
But the Sandiganbayan said imposing a preventive suspension was a precautionary measure “to prevent the accused from using his office to intimidate witnesses or frustrate his prosecution or continue committing malfeasance in office while the case is being heard.” Villamor Visaya Jr., Inquirer Northern Luzon