Former alleged mutiny leader to head MMDA

Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim

Another military man is joining the Duterte administration.

Retired Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim will head the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), Malacañang said on Saturday.

Current MMDA chair Thomas Orbos will return to his previous post as general manager, according to Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea.

The 61-year-old Lim is a 1978 graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point. An officer in the Army’s Scout Ranger Regiment, Lim was one of the leaders of the 1989 coup attempt against then President Corazon Aquino.

The rebel soldiers, however, were forced to surrender and Lim was among those who marched the troops back to the barracks where he and other coup plotters were detained. They were amnestied in 1995.

Lim again was arrested and detained in 2006 on charges of rebellion and plotting a coup against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

In 2007, he and other officers, including Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, held out at Manila Peninsula Hotel for hours in an alleged attempt to trigger a mutiny but were forced to surrender. After Arroyo’s term, he was released from military detention.

He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2010 and later served as deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Customs (BOC) under President Benigno Aquino III.

He resigned from the BOC in 2013 after President Aquino castigated the bureau in a State of the Nation Address. Lim said then he agreed with the President that the agency had performed dismally.