A Boracay property owner filed a libel suit against Boulevard Holdings Inc. chairman Jose Marcel Panlilio for a series of media reports that allegedly maligned her in questioning her planned, court-sanctioned public auction of a beachfront lot to settle her debt to a Quezon City-based realty company.
Mila Yap-Sumndad, who owns part of the beach frontage of Friday’s Boracay Island Resort, said in a statement she filed the criminal complaint against Panlilio for issuing “malicious charges and accusations” to the media in February, questioning her right to sell a property that Panlilio claimed she no longer owned.
Two lawyers, meanwhile, are facing disbarment charges before the Integrated Bar of the Philippines for their alleged complicity in what the complainant described as last year’s unauthorized and violent takeover of the beachfront property.
Chief security officer Carlos Bautista of Underwatch Providers Inc. formally asked the IBP Commission on Bar Discipline last week to disbar lawyers Don Carlo Ybañez and Carl Jon Mucho for directing a Municipal Circuit Trial Court sheriff, local policemen and civilians to unlawfully “break open the premises” in a portion of Friday’s Boracay Island Resort.
“For wantonly violating the Code of Professional Responsibility, Ybañez and Mucho of Chavez Mirana Aseoche Law Offices should be removed from the practice of law,” said Bautista in his March 4 complaint to the IBP against these lawyers of Friday’s Holdings.
UPI was the Quezon City-based security agency tapped by Yap-Sumndad to secure her parcel of land within Friday’s resort after she repossessed it following the 2014 expiration of her family’s 25-year lease agreement with Friday’s Holdings Inc. that operates the resort.
Ybañez and Mucho, meanwhile, both belong to the Chavez Miranda Aseoche law firm hired by FHI in an ongoing legal battle with the original lessor over the beach frontage that FHI has publicly estimated to be worth P240 million.
BHI controls Friday’s Holdings Inc. that operates the resort, while Yap-Sumndad owns a 1,447-square meter parcel within the tourist establishment.
Yap-Sumndad is a daughter and one of the successors-in-interest of the late Benjamin and Pilar Yap, the original owners of 2,564 square meter of land inside the resort. The Yaps forged a 25-year lease agreement with FHI in 1989.
Yap-Sumndad acquired about 60 percent, or 1,447 sq. m. of the property after her parents died, while the rest was shared equally by her siblings.
Yap-Sumndad said she repossessed her property when the 25-year lease agreement expired in February 2014.
However a year later, the BHI/FHI group forcibly took over the lot with the aid of a local court sheriff and over a hundred persons, including cops belonging to the Philippine National Police Boracay Tourist Assistance Center.