The former top executives of Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp. filed charges against former Customs and port officials for alleged perjury.
Edgar Chua, the former country chair of Pilipinas Shell, along with PSPC executives Nigel Avila and Roberto Kanapi filed a criminal complaint on Jan. 4, 2017 at the Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office against former Customs commissioner Napoleon Morales, former Port of Batangas collector Juan Tan and Batangas-based media person Lourdes Aclan.
The former PSPC executives alleged that the respondents “willfully made blatant false statements” in accusing them of illegal importation and violation of Republic Act 3019 [the Graft and Corrupt Practices Act] in a complaint filed with the Ombudsman on Sept. 14, 2016.
Morales, Tan and Aclan named the former PSPC executives in relation to Shell’s non-payment of taxes supposedly due from the company’s past importations of catalytic cracked gasoline and light catalytic cracked gasoline and alkylate.
They also named former President Benigno Aquino III and former Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima for allowing the company to do so.
The former Shell executives, however, said the respondents did not submit any proof to support their allegations which they described as “all perjuries, outright lies and patently untrue.”
The former Shell executives said the company had dutifully complied with the prevailing rules and regulations, promulgated by the Bureau of Internal Revenue from 2003-2009, which Morales and Tan themselves implemented, being tax collecting agents of the BIR.
They claimed that Morales and Tan appeared to have changed and made their own interpretation of the rules in insisting that double excise taxes be imposed on PSPC’s importations of CCG and LCCG and retroactively at that.
Pilipinas Shell early this month won a case against the Bureau of Customs, which had accused the petroleum refiner and distributor of having “failed to timely pay duties and taxes on its crude imports over two decades ago.”
Shell said the Supreme Court had granted the firm’s petition “and accordingly reversed and set aside the decisions of the lower courts” that had previously favored the customs bureau in earlier years.
“In the decision, the Supreme Court stated that ‘a perusal of the records reveals that there is neither any iota of evidence nor concrete proof offered and admitted to clearly establish that petitioner committed any fraudulent acts’ and ‘that there is no factual finding of fraud established herein,’” Shell said.