Consolacion town in Cebu (Wikipedia maps)
CEBU CITY — Agents of the National Bureau of Investigation in Central Visayas (NBI-7) arrested a man who pretended to be a lawyer and represented a client in court.
Noel Maricuelo, 47, was caught after he received P15,000 — the second of a set of payments from the complainant — in an entrapment operation inside a mall in Consolacion town, north Cebu, past 5 p.m. on Tuesday.
Special Investigator Agapito Gierran said Maricuelo duped Kirby Magdadaro, a master mariner, and made the latter believe that he was a lawyer.
“It was only lately that the complainant discovered that the man representing him in court is not a lawyer,” Gierran said in an interview on Wednesday.
In an interview, the suspect denied the accusations leveled against him, saying Magdadaro was the one who made the pleadings and not him.
“I never claimed to be a lawyer. I was just set up by the complainant,” he said in Cebuano.
The money he received from the complainant, Maricuelo said, was meant to thank him for helping Magdadaro.
Magdadaro said Maricuelo, one of the tenants that occupied their apartment in Liloan, volunteered to be their lawyer in an ejectment case aimed at reclaiming one of his real estate properties.
The Municipal Circuit Trial Court of Compostela and Liloan towns, however, dismissed the case last February.
Magdadaro said he conferred with Maricuelo who accused the judge of being biased.
The complainant approached a lawyer who perused the documents and pleadings filed by Maricuelo.
Magdadaro was told that the pleadings prepared by the suspect had several defects.
To validate if the suspect was really a lawyer, Magdadaro sought the assistance of the NBI who later found out from the Supreme Court’s Office of the Bar Confidant and the Integrated Bar of the Philippines’ Cebu City chapter that Maricuelo’s name was not on the official Roll of Attorneys. The lawyer’s identification number used by the suspect, belongs to another lawyer, according to Gierran. Since he represented the complainant in court, Maricuelo demanded and received at least P35,000 from the complainant.
The NBI hatched an entrapment operation that led to the arrest of Maricuelo.
Charges of estafa and falsification of documents will be filed against the suspect at the Cebu Provincial Prosecutor’s Office.
Gierran urged other people who might have been victimized by Maricuelo to visit the NBI office and file charges against the suspect who has been detained at the bureau’s stockade in Cebu City. SFM