The Sandiganbayan has filed charges against a mayor of Antique owing to her alleged unlawful approval of the cutting of 245 coconut trees in the municipality in 2014.
The Ombudsman said Mayor Genevive Gumban Lim-Reyes of Caluya, Antique violated the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act and one count of the Coconut Preservation Act when she “willfully, unlawfully and criminally” ordered the cutting of 254 coconut trees planted and cultivated on the five-hectare land of a certain Juliet Ramos in Barangay Tinogboc on Feb. 28, 2014.
It said Reyes used her position as public servant by approving the clearing operations without due consideration of Ramos’s civil rights.
Reyes also was found to have conducted the tree cutting “without compliance with the legal processes of a prior public consultation and judicial recovery of possession, absent a permit to cut the said coconut trees from the Philippine Coconut Authority.”
The anti-graft court recommended a P42,000 bail for Reyes, P30,000 for graft and P12,000 for violation of RA 8048.
The case is part of the situation on Semirara Island, which is under Caluya’s jurisdiction. Hundreds of residents there had opposed their relocation by the municipal government, according to the Commission on Human Rights.
Lawyer Jonnie Dabuco, CHR regional assistant director, said the residents of Sitio Sabang in Barangay Tinogboc told a CHR team they did not want to leave their community and transfer to Sitio Poocan in the same village.
Caluya planned to transfer more than 100 families to a five-hectare relocation site in Poocan where new houses will be constructed by the town and Semirara Mining Corp. .
Semirara Island hosts SMC, operated by David M. Consunji Inc. and one of Asia’s biggest coal mines.
It is one of the nine islands comprising Caluya in Antique at the northern end of Panay Island.
Lim-Reyes said Sabang residents would have to be transferred to Poocan because the land they were occupying had been reverted from the municipal government to the private donor.
Dabuco said in previous news reports that the villagers feared the loss of their livelihood, which was based on fishing and seaweed-gathering, and their source of water. They also did not want to dislocate their children who are studying in an elementary school in their community.
Municipal legal officer Voltaire Gumban had denied that most of the residents of Sabang were against the relocation.