Government prosecutors on Monday asked a Makati court to issue a hold-departure order against Cebu-based trader Peter Lim in connection with the criminal charges filed against him by the Justice department.
They asked the Makati Regional Trial Court Branch 65 to order the Bureau of Immigration to issue the order against Lim, saying he was still at large and that he frequently traveled abroad.
The Philippine National Police said the Justice department’s decision to indict Lim and others on drug charges justified the police’s efforts to pin down drug lords.
“The indictment of Peter Lim is consistent with our own investigation,” Police Chief Oscar Albayalde told reporters.
“This only goes to show that the government’s campaign against illegal drugs does not discriminate against the poor. The law applies to all.”
On Aug. 11, Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said Immigration had received information that Lim had returned to the country following a trip abroad.
Three days ago, the Justice department recommended Lim’s indictment for allegedly conspiring to trade in illegal drugs with self-confessed drug distributor Kerwin Espinosa and several other people.
In the absence of any restraining order from the Supreme Court, the department went ahead with the filing of charges against Lim before the Makati City Regional Trial Court Lim’s petition to stop the criminal proceedings.
But Espinosa’s lawyer insisted there was no proof linking his client to the drugs seized from the house of his father Rolando, the former mayor of Albuera, Leyte, who was slain in 2016.
During trial at the Manila Regional Trial Court’s Branch 26, the prosecution’s witness, a Leyte police officer, confirmed he did not find anything that would implicate Espinosa to the seized items.
In a resolution released last Friday, the Justice department’s prosecutors said they found probable cause to indict Lim along with Espinosa, Peter Co, Marcelo Adorco, Lovely Impal and Ruel Malindangan for drug trafficking.
The prosecutors ruled that the admission of Espinosa during the legislative investigation of the Senate committees on justice and public order, together with Adorco’s positive identification of Lim as one of Kerwin’s suppliers of dangerous drugs, was enough to establish probable cause to charge them with conspiracy to trade in illegal drugs.
They rejected Lim’s defense that he was not the alias “Jaguar” as he was positively identified by both Espinosa and Adorco. Besides, the prosecutors said, Lim’s alibi that he could not have possibly been in Thailand during the time attested to by Adorco had to yield to the positive and affirmative statements of the witness.
The department’s indictment of Lim came three weeks after its prosecutors recommended the filing of a criminal complaint against Espinosa, Co, Adorco, Impal and Malindangan for committing the same offense. With PNA