ERASMO GABISON AND JULIANA V. DE LOS ANGELES, PETITIONERS, VS. THE HONORABLE SANDIGANBAYAN AND THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, RESPONDENTS.

Sometime between March 1 to April 4, 1979, the Tanodbayan filed
with the respondent Sandiganbayan one hundred twenty-six (126) cases charging
certain public officials/employees of Region VII of the Ministry of Public
Highways and the Danao City Highway Engineering District, including four
private contractors/suppliers of road constructing materials, with the crime of
estafa thru falsification of public and commercial documents. Two of the said private contractors/suppliers
charged were Erasmo Gabison and Juliana de los Angeles, petitioners
herein. Out of the 126 cases, Gabison
was charged in thirty-seven (37) of them, while de los Angeles was charged in
nineteen (19).

All the 126 informations were identically worded except as to
persons, dates, amounts and materials/supplies involved. The informations alleged that on several
occasions, covered by the period from January 1 to July 3, 1978, the accused
government officials, namely: Jose Bagasao, Asst. Director, Region VII,
Ministry of Public Highways; Angelina Escano, Finance Officer; Rolando
Mangubat, Chief Accountant; Delia Preagido, Asst. Chief Accountant, all of the
same office; Ernestorio Sabarre, District Engineer of the Danao City Highway
Engineering District; Adolfo Sucalit, Asst. District Engineer; Rocilo Neis,
Asst. District Engineer; Romeo Andrino, Senior Civil Engineer; Rafael Alberio,
Civil Engineer; Florencio Masecampo, Administrative Officer; Milagros Pisao,
Chief Accountant; Dulcisimo Lucenas, Property Custodian, all of the same office
and Gualberto Toledo, District Auditor of the Commission on Audit (COA, for
short) assigned to the Danao City Highway Engineering District (HED), taking
advantage of their official positions and conniving with the private suppliers
who are their co-accused in the informations pertaining to them, namely:
Gabison, Jariol, Nunez and de los Angeles, committed estafa thru falsification
of public and commercial documents in Danao City, by willfully, unlawfully and
feloniously falsifying the following public documents, namely: Letters of
Advice of Allotment, Requests for Obligation of Allotment, Abstract of Sealed
Quotations, Purchase Orders, Delivery Receipts, Reports of Inspection and
General Vouchers, by making it appear that Region VII of the Ministry of Public
Highways regularly issued LAAs to the Danao City Highway Engineering District
for the purchase of gravel surface course, except Case No. 069 which is for the
delivery of 33 pails of reflectorized traffic paint and 24 pieces of bridge
approach warning devices for the repair or shoulder repair of the Cebu North
Hagnaya Wharf Road, hereinafter referred to as the Wharf Road, that the
Requests for Obligation of Allotment were prepared in favor of the lowest
bidder and that the ordered construction materials were duly delivered and
inspected when, in truth and in fact, as all the accused knew, the foregoing
were false and incorrect, and that because of these falsifications, the accused
were able to collect from the Danao City Highway Engineering District the
amounts alleged in the informations totalling P6,277,018.00 in payment of the
non-existent deliveries and, once in possession of said amounts, the accused
misappropriated, converted and misapplied the said amounts for their own
personal needs to the damage and prejudice of the govern­ment in the said
amount of P6,277,018.00.

Together, with their co-accused, petitioners herein were
arraigned and tried jointly in all the cases filed against them. In the course of the trial, two of the
accused, namely, Milagros Pisao and Dulcisimo Lucenas were discharged and
utilized as state witnesses.

In a single decision* promulgated on November 29, 1979,
respondent court acquitted accused Rocilo Neis, Rafael Alberio and Ernestorio
Sabarre on grounds of reasonable doubt. All the other accused, including petitioners herein, were convicted in
all the cases they were respectively charged and were sentenced in each case to
an indeterminate penalty ranging from eight (8) years, eight (8) months and one
(1) day of prision mayor as minimum to ten (10) years, eight (8)
months and one (1) day of prision mayor as maximum, to pay a fine
of P3,500.00 and to indemnify the government of the amounts defrauded.

Petitioner sought reconsideration of the said decision which was
denied, hence, the present petition raising both questions of law and of fact.

The questions of law are: (1) whether the Sandigan­bayan was
validly created and constituted; (2) whether PD 1606 which amended PD 1486
creating the Sandiganbayan, partakes of the nature of an ex post facto
law and violates the rights of the accused to due process and equal protection
of the law.

The aforesaid legal issues have been set at rest in the case of
Nunez vs. Sandiganbayan, 111 SCRA 433, which was the first case contesting the
constitutionality of the decree creating the Sandiganbayan. In said cases, We ruled that PD 1606 as
amended, is constitutional and does not violate the equal protection, due
process and ex post facto clauses of the
Constitution. This ruling was
reiterated in the cases of Calubaquib vs. Sandigan­bayan, 117 SCRA 493; De
Guzman vs. People, 119 SCRA 337; Rodriquez vs. Sandiganbayan, 120 SCRA 659;
Alviar vs. Sandiganbayan, 137 SCRA 63, and recently in Mangubat vs.
Sandiganbayan, G.R. Nos. 52872-52997, promulgated on January 30, 1987.

Petitioners also raised the question of the suffi­ciency of the
evidence upon which their convictions were predicated. They argue that the Sandiganbayan
misapprehended the facts of these cases in ruling that no deliveries of road
materials were made by them; that no public bidding was conducted; and that
they acted in conspiracy with their co-accused.

Again, these contentions have no merit.

As regards the non-delivery of construction road materials, the
evidence against petitioners is clearly not wanting to prove their guilt. We need only to repeat what the
Sandiganbayan found as to the evidence showing that petitioners committed the
offenses charged:

“State witness Lucenas, who as property custodian of the Danao
City HED, re­quisitions materials and supplies and over­sees the properties of
the government entrusted to him, recommends approval of all the Requisitions
for Supplies or Equipment and signs the Report of Inspection of materials
delivered as having received the same, spontaneously and categorically declared
with marked fluency and ease, that in all the one hundred twenty-six (126)
General Vouchers and Reports of Inspection signed by him, he has not received
any material in the Wharf Road, and that it was only upon instruction of
Masecampo that he signed the General Vouchers and the supporting documents,
some in their office already filled up and the rest in the house of Masecampo
in blank (TSN, pp. 215 to 234, August 7, 1979 hearing). Lucenas became more convincing in the
thorough cross examination to which he was subjected wherein he remained firm
and unshaken in his claim of non-delivery of constructions materials in the
Wharf Road. The aforesaid testi­mony of
Lucenas was corroborated by Salengua, Danao City Public Works Supervisor, who
testified that he did not notice asphalt­ing in the Wharf Road (TSN, p. 30, May
30, 1979 hearing); by Abdulia Rondina, Secretary-Treasurer of Barangay Maslog,
one of the barangays traversed by the Wharf Road, that there was no repair or
delivery of construc­tion materials noted by her from January to June 1978
(TSN, pp. 119-120; May 30, 1979 hearing); and finally by NBI Agent Nereo
Joaquin that in November 1978, in the course of his investigation of these
anomalies, he inspected the items of deli­veries stated in the General Vouchers
and ‘found out that there were no deliveries made as alleged in the vouchers’
and that although ‘in the voucher it was made to appear that materials were
needed in those places, we found out that there is no need to put those materials
in this portion of the highway because that highway is in a very good
condition’ made of concrete and asphalt and that the shoulders of the high­way
were also in good condition’ (TSN, pp. 65 to 68, July 25, 1979 hearing). The tes­timony of Joaquin becomes more
convincing by his detailed report (Exhibits “CCC”, “CCC-1”
to “CCC-9) showing the date of the supposed deliveries, the vouchers
covering them, the kilometer posts where the supposed deliveries were made, the
quantity of the supposed deliveries and the contractors who supposedly made
them.

“The ocular inspection likewise indubitably demonstrated that
there was no need to deliver to the Wharf Road 123,683 cubic meters of gravel
surface for the highway is partly asphalted and concreted and in good condition
and if said volume of mate­rials had been applied on the shoulders of the road,
then in the words of Engr. Abesamis, the shoulders of the road, both sides,
will be about two meters higher than the surface of the road (TSN, p. 294, July
25, 1979 hearing). The truth, however,
as the ocular inspection showed, the shoulder of the Wharf Road, except a few
meters which seem to have just been repaired, is in good condition for a long
time judging from the age of vegetation which may have been in existence long
before 1978; that some portions of the Wharf Road have no shoulder, either the
road immediately adjoins the private lot like in the city proper of Danao or no
shoulder at all because it is already the sea. And with respect to the 8,232 metric tons of bituminous concrete surface
course, that no delivery at all was made is shown by the lack of necessity for
such volume of materials for more than five (5) km. of the Wharf Road is
concreted and in good condition; and the fact that during the ocular inspection
there was an overlaying of premix of the Wharf Road including the concrete por­tion
which started last April, 1979 shows that actually there was no application of
bituminous concrete surface course, for had it been so, there would have been
no need of the overlaying again of asphalt. Said overlaying of premix in April 1979 is even quite intriguing as it
tends to conceal the true condition of the Wharf Road in 1978.” (pp.
31-34, Decision)

This Court is bound by the facts found by the Sandiganbayan. Our power to review the decisions of that
special tribunal is the same as Our jurisdiction to review the decisions of the
Court of Appeals (Calubaquib vs. Sandiganbayan, supra).

On the question of public bidding, three con­tractors, namely,
Olegario Nadela, Feliciano Chavez and one Adlawan, testified that they did not
participate in any public bidding nor submitted any bid to the Danao City HED
although their names appeared in the Abstract of Sealed Quotation which was
attached to the general voucher as one of the supporting documents. Likewise, state witness Dulcisimo Lucenas,
property custodian of the Davao City HED, testified on the absence of actual
bidding (p. 34, Decision). During the
trial, the defense claimed that, except in eight instances, they dispensed with
the public bidding and relied merely on previous bids made by contractors
because it will favor the government in the light of the continuing increase of
prices. We agree with the trial court
in not giving weight to this contention because other contractors, if allowed
to participate in an actual bidding, could have bidded lower than the said
previous bids.

Finally, petitioners stressed that from the evi­dence presented,
it was not proven that they conspired with their co-accused to defraud the
government. The records show, however,
that individual acts of the accused clearly point to a single criminal intent,
one performing one part of the transaction and the others another part of the
same transaction, so as to complete it with a view to attaining the object
which they were pursuing, to wit: to
defraud the government. All their
individual acts were so synchronized leaving no room for any doubt that there
was conspiracy and connivance among all the accused. The Sandiganbayan observed that:

“An overall view of the evidence presented compressively
projects, the concerted and associated actions of the accused, including Pisao
and Lucenas stemming from a common object to de fraud government through
falsification of public documents which the accused public officers prepared in
the dis­charge of their functions. Everything started from the preparation and issuance of fake Letters of
Advice of Allotment by Bagasao and Mangubat, actively assisted by Escano who
approved the Journal Vouchers, Exhibits ‘T’, ‘T-1’ to ‘T-8′, and recommended
for approval the monthly trial balances from January to August, 1978, Exhi­bits
“H’, ‘H-1’ to ‘H-7’, and by Preagido who entered in the General Journals
(Exhibits ‘V-1’ to ‘V-22’) the entries in Exhibits ‘T’, ‘T-1’ to ‘T-8’ (except
Exhibit ‘T-2’) and certified on the correctness of the trial balances for June,
July and August, 1978 (Exhibits ‘H’, ‘H-6’ and ‘H-7’), thus facilitating the
disbursements under the fake let­ters of Advice of Allotment; and by officials
of the district, namely: Sucalit, Andrino, Toledo and Masecampo, who shrewdly
made it appear on the district that there were valid requisitions and
deliveries of materials funded by the fake Letters of Advice of Allotment and
finally by Gabison, Nunez, Jariol and De los Angeles, who, using their
businesses as a camouflage, stood as the contractors and suppliers who
supposedly delivered the materials and finally collec­ted the payment
thereof. The previous testimony of
Lucenas, originally one of the accused, that he followed the instruction of
Masecampo to sign documents in blank because he understands ‘that this is a
syndicate which includes the regional people’ and the testimony of Pisao, also
an original accused, that Sucalit told her ‘Why are you’ afraid when the
Ministry of Public Highways Manila, knows all about this (TSN, p. 92, August 6,
1979 hearing)’ elimi­nate any doubt of the existence of the conspiracy
including not only the accused herein but also some officials in the Ministry
level.

“Indeed, as the evidence undoubtedly show, had anyone of them
only refused to do what he/she did, the whole scheme would have collapsed. Like in a jigsaw puzzle, the act of one is
indispensable the absence of which would render the puzzle insolvable. Had not Bagasao and Mangubat issued the
Letters of Advice of Allot­ment, the operation would not have started. x x x So with the contractors, had they not
posed as having delivered the materials, the plot would have not been finally
materialized. But judging from the testimonies
of Pisao and Lucenas, let it be said that those who formed part of the
conspiracy might have done it either in their inor­dinate obsession to be
wealthy overnight or for lack of cour­age to stick to what is moral and upright
against the onslaught of an evil design.” (pp. 66-68, Decision)

WHEREFORE, the petition is DISMISSED for lack of
merit. The appealed decision of
respondent Sandigan­bayan with respect to petitioners is herein AFFIRMED.

Costs against petitioners.

SO ORDERED.

Teehankee, C.J., Yap, Fernan, Narvasa, Melencio-Herrera,
Gutierrez, Jr., Cruz, Paras, Feliciano, Gancayco, Padilla, Sarmiento, and Cortes, JJ., concur.

*
Penned by Presiding Justice Manuel Pamaran with the concurrence of Justices
Bernardo Fernandez and Romeo Escareal.