My appeal for reconsideration regarding the cancellation of the 50-year lease contract of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office with the Philippine Tuberculosis Society of the Quezon Institute is now being deliberated by the Supreme Court’s 3rd Division composed of Associate Justices Presbitero Velasco, Roberto Abad, Diosdado Peralta, and Jose Mendoza.

On Oct. 22, 2010, I filed a case before the SC against the present PCSO board headed by chairman Margie Juico and her directors, Aleta Tolentino, Francisco Joaquin, Mabel Mamba, Betty Nantes, and general manager Jose Ferdinand Rojas who conspired to immediately terminate the PCSO’s lease contract against the will of the over 1,200 PCSO employees who were totally opposed to the transfer of the PCSO offices to the Philippine International Convention Center at lightning speed simply because Juico had a hidden agenda of brokering the 6.5-hectare and buildings occupied by the PCSO.

For 13 years, the PCSO had a permanent home until Juico decided to abandon it.  She did it under the guise that in case of “a very strong earthquake” the solid, massive, and well- constructed historical buildings would “collapse”.  Those buildings have withstood all the earthquakes since 1938 when they were constructed, and nothing happened to them.

Juico used a certificate which she conveniently acquired from her friend, DPWH Secretary Rogelio Singson, who never even inspected the structure but only sent two engineers (who were not even structural engineers from his office) to do a brief ocular inspection and declared it for “demolition,” attested after the fact by a structural engineer sitting in his airconditioned office, site unseen.

The transfer to PICC was effected in September 2010, barely two months after Juico took office on July 5, 2010 without the approval of the President, which the law required. The approval from the Office of the President signed by Executive Secretary Ochoa came in November after Juico had completely transferred to the PICC.

For that alone, the cancellation of the 50-year lease contract and transfer to PICC without the approval of President Aquino made it illegal; and, therefore, null and void. But Juico got away with it by deceiving Malacanang, saying  that the PICC was “cheaper” at only P1.9 million a month, a claim  which proved to be a lie, for records show that the cost of the rental in PICC is twice  what the PCSO was giving the QI in the form of assistance to the hospital and clinics nationwide for patients with tuberculosis, which remains to be the number 3 killer disease.

Not only did the over 1,200 PCSO employees suffer from the transfer;  the Childhaus for children afflicted with cancer were made to move out from one of the buildings in the complex by Nov. 27, 2010 only to learn that the sale was to be effected in December yet that same year. What Juico   did to 70 children with leukemia was inhuman.

The study by only one construction firm was found erroneous and was debunked by the previous board, for it applied the New Structural Code of the Philippines, a standard only applied to new structures, not to old ones, for none of them would pass the test.

The historical buildings were designed and constructed by National Artist Juan Nakpil, father of Philippine Architecture. As a world-renowned architect, Felino Palafox remarked: “Old historical structures are never demolished; they are repaired.”

But the defect was minor, a fact  which we of the past board had already repaired before the new administration took over.

I filed the case before  the SC on behalf of the more than 1,200 PCSO employees who could not fight back.  That frustrated the sale of the property while the case was pending in the SC.

I lost that case August 31 last year or almost a year after. I filed a petition for reconsideration the same month, and it is now being deliberated on.

My appeal is to remand it to a lower court so that the case can be argued. The decision of the 3rd Division was flimsy. It simply said that the present PCSO board has the right to decide. But the PCSO, which is under the Office of the President, cannot decide on its own. It needs the final approval of the President, but   there was none before Juico transferred to the PICC.

The SC’s 3rd Division must reconsider that fact, for the cancellation of a 50-year lease contract is not a joke: It is a lifetime contract which the employees of the PCSO lost out on, for the PCSO has the first option to buy the prime property “at a very reasonable price” as stated in the contract which then PTSI president Justice Cecilia Munoz Palma and I signed, affirmed by the PCSO board, and approved by then President Fidel V. Ramos.

To think that now PCSO chairman Juico, as one of my directors, was one of the signatories to the board resolution in 1997 when I was then the PCSO chairman.

After spending hundreds of millions refurbishing the buildings to last for a lifetime as PCSO’s permanent home  and installing all the state-of-the-art facilities also worth hundreds of millions of pesos, Margie   casually abandoned it and destroyed all the installations.

That, to me, is plunder of the highest degree, throwing away public money with wanton abandon.

No investigation was conducted by this administration despite my appeal to this government to look into the case for the sake of the PCSO employees who were farmed out to several satellite offices in Metro Manila, for only 500 employees could be accommodated in the tiny space in the PICC, making it difficult for the poor patients to commute from one place to another just to seek PCSO medical assistance.

The PCSO no longer has a face or identity, for when one speaks of it, it’s either in Pasay City, Quezon City or Manila. Only God knows where the different departments are located.

Where is the PCSO now? Your guess is as good as mine. Like a “wandering Jew,” the department you are looking for is either here or there.

I appeal to the SC’s 3rd Division to please study the case very carefully before making its final decision or the valuable property inside the QI complex, which the PCSO could call its own, will be lost forever.

True justice is hereby requested.