The Department of Justice has recommended the indictment of two Bureau of Customs examiners and two appraisers in connection with the illegal importation of hazardous solid waste from Canada in 2013 and 2014.
In a resolution, a DOJ panel of prosecutors ruled it found probable cause to prosecute Customs examiners Benjamin Perez Jr. and Eufracio Ednaco as well as appraisers Matilda Bacongan and Jose Saromo for violation of Republic Act No. 6969 or the Toxic Substances and Hazardous and Nuclear Waste Control Act of 1990.
The prosecutors stressed that respondents “knew, or were supposed to know, that the items entering the Philippines were hazardous materials and not plastic scrap materials.”
“After all, they claimed to have physically examined the subject importations. When they re-routed these shipments to ‘green,’ they effectively facilitated the importation of hazardous waste into the Philippines,” the DOJ prosecutors said.
The DOJ, however, cleared Environment Undersecretary Juan Miguel Cuna and three others of criminal charges over the shipments of 103 container vans of hazardous wastes from Canada for lack of evidence.
“There was no evidence to support the finding that respondent Cuna’s act of issuing a Registry Certificate to Chronic Plastics constituted gross inexcusable negligence, and that it gave Chronic Plastics unwarranted benefits and caused undue injury to the government,” the investigating fiscals said.
“Respondents from the Environment Management Bureau could not have determined, prior to the importation, that the shipments contained used, mixed, unsorted or heterogeneous plastic materials because it was only during the actual inspection of the shipments that they determined the status or types of materials placed therein.”