Luisita land deal: Aquino kin underpaid, says ex-justice

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—The company owned by relatives of President Aquino has complained to the Department of Agrarian Reform Adjudication Board (Darab) that it was underpaid for Hacienda Luisita lands acquired by the government for agrarian reform in Tarlac province.

In a telephone interview on Monday, retired Sandiganbayan Associate Justice Harriet Demetriou, legal adviser of Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI), said the company had written the Darab about its position on the land payment but did not reveal how much more HLI was seeking from the agency.

HLI is 70-percent owned by the Cojuangco family’s Tarlac Development Corp. (Tadeco). It was paid P471 million by Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP) for the 4,500 hectares of hacienda property that were covered by agrarian reform and distributed to more than 6,000 farm workers.

Demetriou, in a separate statement on Sunday, described the amount as “certainly inadequate.”

“Just compensation must not only be fair, it must be reasonable, full and prompt,” she said in reaction to a claim made by ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio that the government had overpaid the Cojuangco clan by P167 million in interest payments.

On Monday, Demetriou told the Inquirer that the underpayment was evident in the fact that the Supreme Court recognized the amount of P1.33 billion from  the sale of 580.51 ha of  the sugar estate. The P1.33 billion represents proceeds of the sale that the high court ordered HLI to give to the agrarian reform beneficiaries as share.

HLI sold 500 ha to Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.  and 80.51 ha to the Bases Conversion and Development Authority  that it used in the construction of portions of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway.

“The P471 million paid to HLI merely follows the formula followed by the DAR (Department of Agrarian Reform) and the Landbank which has been repeatedly rejected by the Supreme Court as not reflective of just compensation or true market value,” Demetriou said.

She said industry values were used instead of actual HLI production data. Sugarcane was grown on Hacienda Luisita lands and the crops were milled at the estate’s own mill, Central Azucarera de Tarlac, which the Cojuangcos also owned.

Tadeco, in a report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, valued the agricultural land at P47,000 a hectare in 1988 or a year before the DAR implemented the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program at the estate through a stock-sharing scheme instead of land distribution.

Demetriou said the “claim of overpayment ignores the long established definition of just compensation, [which is] a sale between a willing seller and a willing buyer, reflective of the true market value.”

The right of the landowner for just compensation, she said, is guaranteed under the Constitution and Republic Act

No. 6657 (Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law of 1988).

Anthony Parungao, DAR undersecretary for legal affairs, denied that the government overpaid HLI, saying LBP determined the value of land using 1989 as reckoning point for using the formula in RA 6657. It was the Supreme Court that set 1989 as the year of the taking of the land.

“With 1989 as reckoning point, the value of Hacienda Luisita was determined to be P67,550.94 per hectare. The total area acquired is 4,500.7976 ha. Thus, the amount of just compensation to HLI landowners was computed to be P304,033,138.20,” Parungao said.

The landowner, under the law, can get 25 percent in cash and get the 75 percent in agrarian reform bonds over a period of 10 years. The bonds earned a total interest of P167.5 million up to 1999, Parungao said.

Demetriou said the interest computation was “grossly inaccurate.” This, she said, did not reflect “interest on the cash portion from 1989 to 2013 and the interest on the values of the bonds periodically converted to cash from 1989 to 2013.”