LAPANDAY Foods Corp. condemned the theft of property and the arson of its box and plastic manufacturing plants by unidentified men who entered the company’s Davao City compound after disarming the company’s security personnel around 2 in the morning of April 29.
The company said employees who were working at the time of the incident were not harmed or injured. All of the company’s personnel are safe.
Employee mobile phones, computers and other company properties were also stolen by the unidentified intruders who ransacked the offices of the plant. As they were withdrawing from the plant, the intruders set materials on fire that eventually engulfed the plant.
The company said in a statement that while it will cooperate with the Philippine National Police as it investigates this latest criminal act of this armed group the company urged law enforcement agencies, including the Armed Forces of the Philippines to exert effort to prevent these unidentified elements from further endangering the safety and security of people and inflicting damage to private property.
The burning of the plant will lead to the displacement of hundreds of employees and adversely affected those who have existing businesses with the box and plastic plant, Lapanday said.
It is they who are now jobless and shall bear the brunt of the consequences of this vicious act, the company said.
Last week, Department of Agrarian Reform Secretary Rafael Mariano, who failed in his attempt to install farmers belonging to a breakaway group of agrarian reform beneficiaries on lands already registered with Hijo Employees Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Cooperative-1 threatened the company for prohibiting him from escorting these farmers and their supporters from various leftist organizations, Lapanday said.
This breakaway group and their supporters were coddled and abetted by the DAR leadership to openly defy the final and executory order of the court that ruled there was no agrarian dispute and DAR had no jurisdiction on the case, Lapanday said.
The DAR under Mariano’s leadership has become a tool that causes disruption in productive farm operations that pushed persons to defy laws, inflict injury and damage to even other ARBs and ultimately, weaken the economy of the country, Lapanday said.
Lapanday said it hoped that perpetrators of this criminal act would all be identified, charged and brought before the criminal justice system.
