Tax appeals court won’t hear Napoles daughter’s plea

The Court of Tax Appeals Second Division will no longer proceed with the petition filed by Jeane Catherine Napoles questioning the basis of the tax evasion charges against her.

This was despite Napoles’ attempt to invoke the recent moves of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), which could have been used in her favor.

In a resolution dated June 21, the tax court denied Napoles’ May 5 motion seeking a new trial on her petition for review against the BIR  assessment that she had P40.03 million in income tax liabilities.

Jeane Catherine, the youngest child of alleged pork barrel scam mastermind Janet Lim-Napoles, tried several times to save her petition after the court threw it out on Feb. 16 when lawyer Ian Encarnacion missed the pretrial hearing that day.

In her “second motion for new trial” filed on June 13, Napoles said the case should be retried because the BIR under the Duterte administration was including her $1.2-million condo unit at Ritz Carlton in Los Angeles as a taxable property of her mother.

For Jeane Catherine, this could be used as new evidence to disprove her liability to pay taxes on the property.

She earlier claimed that she was not liable for income tax because she was only a student, who received the condo as a gift from her parents.

However, the court rejected the notion that this new evidence was a ground to reopen the case.

The court said it could not entertain the new evidence of the defense since the case did not move to the trial stage.

In addition, the tax court said the motion for new trial, filed on May 5, raised arguments that were merely rehashed from an attempt to appeal the Feb. 16 dismissal.

Napoles argued that the case should be allowed to continue with a new trial because the earlier proceedings were affected by the lawyer’s “mistake and excusable negligence.”

Unmoved, the tax court said a client was “bound by his counsel’s conduct, negligence and mistake in handling a case.”

Associate Justice Juanito C. Castañeda Jr. penned the resolution, with the concurrence of Associate Justice Catherine T. Manahan.