Overflowing money

Christmas, New Year and the Sinulog are over and yet money continues to overflow in the most obvious and even unusual places.

Take for example the P1.6-M burglary at the Cebu City Sports Center (CCSC) last Monday. Cash and valuables were taken from a safe or vault that was attached to a metal filing cabinet of the CCSC’s administration office by persons unknown.

Unknown persons also dumped jewelry worth a reported P2 million at the Umapad landfill site in Mandaue City yesterday, affirming the old cliché that there is, literally, gold in garbage.

In the first case, a security guard was blamed and considered a prime suspect in the burglary despite his protestations of innocence. Being assigned to the said office and being quoted by one utility worker as asking for the key to that office doesn’t help his case.

As far as the Umapad dumpsite discovery is concerned, some scavengers subscribed to yet another cliché, namely “finders keepers, losers weepers” and pawned one gold bracelet for P127,000.

About P500 were distributed to each scavenger, and the finder, a certain Rodrigo Corta, bought construction supplies and helped a sick neighbor with the money that came from the pawned bracelet.

While the first case was outright robbery, the second carries with it some complications. We hope that the lie detector tests to be conducted on the sports center employees and the security guards will lead to the arrest of the suspects and the recovery of the cash and valuables.

Most likely the cash to be awarded to Sinulog winners and used for expenses will have to be placed somewhere a lot more secure than the CCSC office. Why there wasn’t any security camera placed there, one could only ask, but if any more valuables are to be stored, a better security system is in order.

Then again, if reports of an alleged inside job are true, the city government may want to sack some people and hire a new security agency to guard the CCSC. No matter how sophisticated a security system is, if it’s compromised by dishonest people with criminal tendencies the vault or safe may as well be an open invitation to robbery.

On the other hand, the scavengers who discovered the jewelry at the dumpsite needed no further invitation to make money off their loot, abandoned and even questionable its location is.

It would take no ordinary amount of honesty and courage to turn over these valuables to the police, and Corta did what any person in his situation may have done. With the police discovering the jewelry and confiscating some of them, it remains to be seen if Corta and his companions will face charges for pawning jewelry not their own.

Again we hope that the Mandaue City police discover the owners of the jewelry even if initial efforts to find them failed. Whatever be one’s station in life, using something that belongs to someone else is outright robbery.