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The owners of the Philippine Daily Inquirer have lost a Supreme Court case seeking to stop the national government from taking back the Mile-Long Arcade property along Amorsolo St. in Makati.
The high tribunal's Second Division, chaired by acting Chief Justice and former Inquirer columnist Antonio Carpio, reversed a Makati Regional Trial Court order which had earlier granted the Inquirer owners' action to dismiss on a technicality the unlawful detainer case filed by Privatization Management Office.
(Disclosure: Victor C. Agustin is a minority shareholder of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He also recruited then-lawyer Antonio Carpio to write a column for the same newspaper.)
The high tribunal's decision, dated June 20 but released only this week, was penned by Justice Lourdes Sereno, a PNoy appointee and ironically an Inquirer favorite.
With the Supreme Court order, the ejectment case filed by the government against Sunvar Realty Development Corp., controlled by the Rufino-Prieto family that also owns the Inquirer, will now revert to the Makati Metropolitan Trial Court for "summary proceedings."
Sunvar originally leased the 2.29-hectare Mile-Long property for 25 years beginning January 1, 1978.
The lease was supposed to have expired on December 31, 2002 but somehow the landed Rufino-Prieto clan had managed to stipulate in the contract that the lease will be "renewable for another 25 years at Sunvar's exclusive option."
But on June 3, 2002, the government through lot owner National Power Corp. notified Sunvar that it was not renewing the Sunvar contract.
For still unclear reasons, it was only in July 2009 that the government actually filed the unlawful detainer case against Sunvar, seeking P630 million in back rentals from January to March 2009, and another P10.364 million a month thereafter.
In addition to the Mile-Long case, the Inquirer is also involved in another litigation with the government, this time with the Bureau of Internal Revenue over an alleged P4.7 million in income and value-added tax deficiencies.
The BIR case is pending before the Court of Tax Appeals.
Email Vic Agustin at cocktales_tv5@yahoo.com
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