President Aquino’s clan wants P10B for Hacienda

When President Benigno Aquino III was asked for his reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision ordering Hacienda Luisita to be turned over to its farmers, he didn’t bother to applaud this epic victory for social justice. He instead replied quickly: “But there is also just compensation for the landowners.”

That was a slip of the tongue. If the presently embattled high court knuckles under and rules for his kinsmen, “just compensation” would be a staggering P10 billion windfall for one of the country’s most powerful elites.

The Court in its Nov. 22 resolution stipulated that “just compensation” for the Hacienda’s lands to be distributed to farmers will be determined based on its value in 1989. That’s P40,000 per hectare, which the Cojuangcos used to determine the farmers’ “stocks” in its sham land reform undertaken that year. “Just compensation” for the 4,335 hectares would therefore total P173 million.

When the nation’s attention was on the impeachment against Chief Justice Renato Corona that was rammed through Congress Dec. 12, the Cojuangcos’ law firm Belo, Gozon, Elma, Parel, Asuncion on Dec. 16 filed a “Motion to Clarify and Reconsider” the Court’s resolution.

The motion argued that using the land’s 1989 valuation is wrong, and that its 2006 market price must instead be used. That’s 17 years later, during which economic growth made a Luisita Industrial Park with adjacent malls and posh residential areas so profitable that real estate properties there went through the roof. From being a remote sugar plantation from some Gabriel Marquez novel, the Hacienda has developed into an industrial-commercial area that by 2006, its land prices had little semblance to its 1989 levels. (In 2009, former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway project built an artery to the Hacienda that made it so accessible from Manila. With a land area as big as Manila and Makati combined, the Hacienda could even rival the Clark Freeport Zone.)

Under the agrarian reform department’s formula for computing “just compensation” in which the Hacienda’s lands will be valued, one element includes 90 percent of the price of “comparable sales.” There are “comparable sales” made after 1989 that the Cojuangcos themselves cleverly made. One was the 1997-1998 sales by Hacienda Luisita Inc. to its wholly-owned subsidiary Luisita Realty Corp. of 200 hectares for P500 million. The other is the 1998 sale to another subsidiary, Centennary Holdings, of 300 hectares for P750 million. The value of Hacienda lands based on these sales: P2.5 million per hectare. To use the DAR’s formula, 90 percent of this will be P2.25 million per hectare (the other element in the formula, an addition, is 10 percent of market value per tax declaration).

The cost  of the 4,335 hectares using 2006 as reckoning year when the land price was  P2.25 million per hectare, as the Cojuangcos are demanding, would be P9.75 billion.

But the Cojuangcos are even asking for more—why not if they have a scion for a president?  Their motion pointed out: “The landowner must be compensated with interest for the time that lapsed before actual payment.”

That means interest must be paid on the P9.75 billion cost of land up to the time of actual payment. At a 6-percent interest rate, that totals P580 million annually from 2006 to whenever they are paid the P9.57 billion. If government pays them at the end of 2012, the total interest to be paid to the Cojuangcos on top of the P9.75 billion would be P3.5 billion.

It’s a humongous amount the President’s clan wants to be paid for the Hacienda lands:  P9.8 billion (excluding interest) to P13 billion (including interest payments). Those figures are bigger than the government’s 2012 P6-billion budget for agrarian reform or the P7 billion for housing.

It won’t be the Hacienda’s farmers who would pay the P10 billion, per agrarian reform’s principle of affordability.  It would be us taxpayers.

Mr. Aquino, hands-off on the Hacienda case?  It was his first appointee to the Court, Ma. Lourdes Sereno, who prepared a mountain of arguments for the Cojuangcos’ demand for a 2006 date of reckoning.  Her dissenting opinion in the Court’s July 5, 2011 decision was an angry treatise arguing for a 2006 reckoning.  Her 19,000-word dissenting opinion in the November resolution even pointed to where the government can get the huge funds (Pagcor and PCSO, among other sources) to pay the P10 billion. Sereno in fact saved the Cojuangcos’ lawyers a lot of work, as they extensively quoted her arguments in their motion.

Mr. Aquino’s two other appointees, Bienvenido Reyes and Estela Perlas-Bernabe, have also proven to be deserving of their appointments: both also asked for a 2006 pricing.

Note the recent impeachment move against another justice, Mariano del Castillo, do a bit of arithmetic, and the objective of Mr. Aquino’s assault against the Court would be crystal clear.

Justice Lucas Bersamin changed his vote in July and in the November resolution also asked for a 2006 pricing, making it four justices pushing for the Cojuangcos’ wish, as against 10 (Justice Antonio Carpio abstained).  But if Corona and Del Castillo are taken out, that would mean—since Aquino would appoint two replacements—six pro-Cojuangco justices versus eight. That’s just two justices short for the Court to order a P10-billion payment for the Cojuangcos.

With this regime having demonstrated its KGB-like capacity for blackmail using stolen confidential records like bank accounts, and with the precedent of brazenly taking out a Chief Justice, terrorizing two more justices to cave in to the Cojuangcos’ P10-billion wish, or to just go on leave, would be a walk in the park.

E-mail: tiglao.inquirer@gmail.com