Less than an hour after the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) served a search warrant on a warehouse that held businessman Regan King’s rice in Mandaue City late Wednesday afternoon, a representative of a government agency was there to say there was no problem.
The following day, the National Food Authority (NFA), who worked with the NBI in implementing the warrant, got cold feet and refused to take custody of the stocks in the warehouse.
It was the NFA that certified the warehouse was operating illegally. That certification resulted in the court’s issuance of the search warrant.
That same day, Cebu City Councilor Jack Jakosalem called up Secretary Cerge Remonde, who then supposedly informed the President about the incident, and who then relayed through the media that the rice shipment was to be released.
Jakosalem, in an interview, said King requested his help. He confirmed knowing King and said the latter is one of the advertisers of Y101, an FM station he manages.
On that same day too, Cebu City Councilor Gerry Carillo filed, in his capacity as a private lawyer, a motion to quash seeking the nullification of the search warrant.
Carillo, in a separate interview, said he was hired to serve as lead counsel for the businessman.
NBI 7 Director Medardo de Lemos, who received a barrage of calls from people he wouldn't name almost immediately after the raid on King's warehouse was carried out, said his agency will comply with the order Regional Trial Court Executive Judge Fortunato de Gracia gave last Friday, after returning the warrant to the court.
And while he has not received the order from the President to release the rice, de Lemos said he will not object to whatever action the Bureau of Customs (BOC), “who had and who always had” custody of the shipment, will take.
He clarified that the NBI never took custody of the rice. They merely padlocked the warehouse. The rice, he said, was evidence of the allegedly illegal operation.
Asked if his unit will still be active in running against suspected rice smugglers and hoarders as instructed by the President, he said all regional agencies of the NBI are bound to do so.
He found unfair criticisms, mainly coming from King, his lawyer and his media handlers that the raid was “not properly coordinated” and that they didn’t exercise diligence in confirming their information.
“If the raid hadn’t been coordinated, the NFA wouldn’t have been with the team. And if we didn’t exercise diligence, there wouldn’t have been an NFA certification saying the warehouse didn’t have an NFA license,” he said.
Judge de Gracia, in an order released around 4 p.m. Friday, took custody of the shipment: 24,443 bags of rice found in the warehouse.
But because the court does not have storage space, he placed it under the custody of the BOC.
The NBI, though, is to have “unlimited monitoring authority” and the judge tasked the agency to alert the court of “any movement or transaction.”
A joint NBI-NFA team raided warehouse 52 of the Mandaue North Central Compound in Cabancalan, Mandaue City last Wednesday and found what they first estimated was 30,000 sacks of well-milled rice from Vietnam.
The raid, said NBI 7 Executive Officer Ernesto Macabare in an interview during the operation, was not about the rice importation itself, but about the apparently illegal warehousing activity going on in warehouse 52.
Macabare, a lawyer, presented a certification stating that the warehouse, registered in the name of former Cebu Ports Authority general manager Mariano C.J. Martinez, doesn’t have an NFA license to store rice.
Leonito Santiago, an operative from the Customs Intelligence and Investigation Service, was at the warehouse when the raiding team arrived past 5 p.m. to serve the warrant.
He said the rice was under customs custody and undergoing inventory in line with an alert order issued by their national headquarters.
Hours after the raid, Dante Bangayan, an official from the Philippine International Trading Corp. (PITC), also arrived with papers showing everything is aboveboard.
The PITC is the government corporation that imported the rice in behalf of farmers’ cooperatives, where King is an “investment partner.”
Bangayan said the NFA should have known about the arrival of the rice and cited inter-agency relations.
And while he could not give details as to who contacted whom over what, he repeatedly stressed that the importation was aboveboard.
