Mayor’s defense: Only few public officials don’t have mistresses

The mayor’s defense that most public officials have mistresses did not dissuade the Office of the Ombudsman from ordering his six-month suspension.

Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales has slapped Mayor Denny Refol of Altavas, Aklan province, with the administrative sanction for carrying on an affair and even fathering a child with a woman not his wife.

The municipal mayor was found guilty of “disgraceful and immoral conduct” because of his “illicit relationship,” the Ombudsman’s media bureau announced on Monday.

Refol’s penalty all began with an anonymous tip received by the Public Assistance and Corruption Prevention Office of the Office of the Ombudsman in the Visayas.

Investigation showed that Refol maintained the affair although he was already married.

A certificate of live birth also stated that he acknowledged the paternity of the child born in 2007.

The Ombudsman also cited the finding of the National Bureau of Investigation in Western Visayas that “the relationship gained public knowledge in the municipality because respondent [Refol] publicly displayed the same.”

In his defense, Refol said that “at present, there are only a few public officials who have no mistresses.”

He also claimed to have stopped seeing the other woman, making the case moot and academic.

But Morales held that Refol “has not denied the relationship despite the subsistence of his marriage or the fact that he has fathered a child with the woman.”

Because of this, she directed the Department of the Interior and Local Government to implement his suspension as penalty for disgraceful and immoral conduct.

The offense is defined as an act that “violates the basic norm of decency, morality and decorum, abhorred and condemned by the society and the conduct of which is willful, flagrant or shameless, and which shows a moral indifference to the opinions of the good and respectable members of the community.”