CLARK FREEPORT – The Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) accused yesterday some “officers” of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) of illegally placing under the agrarian reform program some 192 hectares of BCDA lands in Morong, Bataan and issuing titles to them to “questionable farmer-beneficiaries.”
BCDA Chairman Felicito Payumo, a native of Bataan, said he has asked the DAR’s Office of the Provincial Agrarian Reform Adjudicator (OPARAD) based in Dinalupihan, Bataan to annul the agrarian reform program coverage in the area.
“I also asked DAR to immediately cancel the Certificates of Land Ownership Award (CLOAs) issued in 2008 covering the area,” Payumo said.
BCDA President and Chief Executive Officer Arnel Casanova reported to OPARAD the “irregular, erroneous, illegal, and anomalous” titling of the land owned by BCDA.
He also named in his letter the 67 purported farmer-beneficiaries involved in the fraud. Copies of the letter were also furnished to the Bataan Provincial Agrarian Reform Officer and the Register of Deeds.
Payumo said the named farmer-beneficiaries listed by DAR documents were allegedly residents of Morong but that he did none of them was familiar to him.
He said initial inquiry indicated the involvement of a “big-time land-grabbing syndicate.”
Payumo noted that under the comprehensive agrarian reform law, a CLOA is issued as proof of ownership of land distributed to qualified agrarian reform program beneficiaries.
This document contains restrictions specified under the agrarian reform law, which also stipulates that it shall be recorded in the concerned Register of Deeds.
Payumo said the BCDA land, located in Barangays Sabang and Binaritan in Morong, used to be the site of the defunct Philippine Refugee Processing Center complex and now serves as the site of Bataan Technology Park, a technology and eco-tourism park run by BCDA subsidiary Bataan Technology Park Inc.
The BCDA land consists of six huge lots (Lot Nos. 1404, 1403, 1384, 1385, 1386, and 1506) that are described in Cadastra 262 of Morong Cadastre.
Payumo recalled that in March 1997, then Pres. Ramos issued Proclamation No. 984, which created the Morong Special Economic Zone and transferred to BCDA these tracts of land.
In May 2004, then Pres. Arroyo issued Special Patent No. 3642 which granted and conveyed the same landholding to BCDA.
Casanova said this meant that the land in dispute was “beyond and outside the authority of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources much more of the Department of Agrarian Reform to dispose of.”
Casanova recalled that the DAR, then under Sec. Nasser Pangandaman, saw the property differently.
“As shown in the fraudulent CLOAs we have just uncovered, the DAR had declared the land as agricultural land,” he said.
Payumo also recalled that in 2006, the Regional Trial Court in Iriga City in Camarines Sur issued a ruling saying that the Morong, Bataan lots (Lot Nos. 1403, 1404, 1384, 1385 1386 and 1506 of Cadastre 262) — the same lots owned by BCDA – were “deemed included in the inventory of the Estate of Hermogenes Rodriguez, et. al.”
“This is the same Estate that had laid claims over tracts of land as vast as the entire city of Bacoor in Cavite, and in other parts of the country, according to some court documents,” Casanova said.
He said, however, that the Supreme Court later upheld the decision of the Court of Appeals nullifying the lower court’s entire special proceedings in Iriga City.
