The lawyer of Korean businessman Kang Tae Sik asked a Court of Appeals Justice to inhibit himself in his client’s deportation case for failing to act on his petition for the issuance of Temporary Restraining Order.
Kang, president of a company engaged in Korean liquor distribution in the country, was arrested last month by Immigration agents after Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II reversed the final and executory decision of his predecessor, now Supreme Court Associate Justice Alfredo Benjamin Caguiao.
Reden Viaje, Kang’s lawyer, said CA Justice Apolinario Bruselas Jr., refused to rule on his petition for fear of not being nominated as associate justice of the Supreme Court by the Judicial Bar Council to which Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II is a member.
Viaje filed a motion for inhibition after Bruselas refused to act on the prayer for issuance of TRO for the deportation of Kang.
“The case was reraffled to Bruselas, last April 3, after Justice Elihu Ybañez voluntarily inhibited himself on grounds that the complainant against Kang, his former lawyer, Alex Tan, was his classmate in San Beda College,” he said.
Tan, Ybañez, DoJ Secretary Aguirre II and DoJ Undersecretary Ricardo Paras were classmates in San Beda. President Rodrigo Duterte also came from the same school. Paras is the DoJ in-charge of the affairs of the Bureau of Immigration.
The petition for issuance of TRO was filed and raffled last March 27, 2017, according to Viaje.
He said that under the rule, the records of the case is supposed to have been transmitted to the CA justice immediately after it was raffled because it has a prayer for TRO.
However, in Kang’s case, the record was only delivered to the CA justice three days after it was raffled off, and it took another two days before Justice Ybanes decided to inhibit himself.
The Korean Embassy in Manila has likewise made an appeal to the Appellate Court to act on Kang’s case.
In his petition, Kang urged for the issuance of TRO against the DoJ and BI from implementing the deportation order and dissolution of Warrant of Deportation considering that both emanated from a void resolution.
In his decision, Caguiao said “It would, indeed, be the height of injustice if we condone the deportation of upright individual, who has made this country his home for the last 38 years-absent any legal ground and merely on the basis of a complaint instituted by Appellant’s own former lawyers.”