Editor Rhony Laigo sought Bander’s placement in Immigration Watch List, but was reportedly unaware that complaint was filed by fictitious accuserBy Francis Johann Verdote, Larry Pelayo and Rene Villaroman
PinoyWatchDog. Com Investigative Team
LOS ANGELES -- In September 2009, Balita Media Editor Rhony Laigo traveled to the Philippines with a mission, to obtain an Immigration Hold Departure Order based on trumped-up criminal charges against Attorney Joel Bander. The ploy was part of his newspaper’s sustained campaign against Bander as the latter had so badly exposed Balita Media’s lies regarding its circulation figures in a Los Angeles Superior Court litigation while representing Asian Journal Publications owned by Roger and Cora Oriel. (PinoyWatchDog.Com will be writing about this false circulation saga in future editions.)
Finally, in late October 2009, Laigo finally achieved his goal by approaching a close friend of the highly discredited former Immigration Commissioner Marcelino Libanan during the administration of President Gloria M. Arroyo.
In January 2011, Judge Joel A. Lucanan of Manila’s Metropolitan Trial Court Branch 37 acquitted Bander from an act of lasciviousness complaint filed by a fictitious accuser by the name of Cristina San Jose. Bander demonstrated to the satisfaction of the court that this complainant was a fake, who even provided a contact address that did not exist in a warehouse district in Metro Manila.
During litigation, Bander retained the legal services of Filipino lawyer Sig Fortun. Although he was acquitted from the act of lasciviousness charges the individuals that created the havoc still remain free. The unwritten law of impunity is still in effect in the Philippines, and apparently also in Los Angeles as practiced by Mr. Laigo, who prided in calling himself a “practicing journalist.”
“A Mockery of the Philippine
Justice System”
On October 1, 2011, at the opening of the Mt. Pinatubo photo exhibit at Carson Mall, PinoyWatchDog.Com editors personally interviewed Mr. Laigo to get his side of the story. Laigo claimed in a taped interview that Attorney Bander was avoiding a warrant of arrest, and he (Laigo) was just personally concerned at the “mockery of the Philippine justice system.”
But the question is --- who was making a mockery of the system, Attorney Bander or Mr. Laigo?
The Philippine court records indicate Attorney Bander’s attorneys appeared before the court in 2006 and were granted a ‘re-investigation’ petition, as Bander was never informed of the fake charges. Bander personally appeared before a Manila Fiscal in 2007, but the complaining party did not appear. In October 2007, Bander filed a Petition for Review with the Arroyo Justice Department that never saw any action whatsoever.
“I refused to bribe anyone,” Bander stated. “That’s why the case took so long.”
And so the case languished. During all those years Mr. Laigo was unconcerned about the alleged ‘mockery’ of the Philippine justice system, at least until Bander exposed Balita Media’s circulation representation lies.
Mr. Laigo’s October 5, 2009, letter to Philippine Immigration bureau’s Libanan went so far as to state “our sources tell us that Mr. Bander fled the country after the judge found probable cause on Ms. San Jose’s complaint.” Bander countered, “that’s absurd, I always had well placed counsel representing me on this matter. I never altered my travel patterns to the Philippines because of this case at all.”
Laigo also referred to a People’s Tonight (a Manila afternoon tabloid newspaper) article that was later retracted by the publishers as untrue and without basis. Indeed, the story spoke of illegal recruitment charges in Branch 78 of the Taguig Trial Court, which does not even exist.
However, when interviewed for this story by PinoyWatchDog.Com editors, Laigo claimed to have no knowledge of the complete falsity of the underlying charges. How can a true journalist not be investigating all the nuances of a story unless there is a perceived agenda of mockery and impunity?
A manual explaining the Philippines legal and political system would have made Bander’s and other foreigners’ lives in the Philippines easier. Sadly, such manuals are nonexistent and non-Filipinos have to experience first-hand the corrupt ways of traditional politics. Non-Filipinos do not even have to be in the Philippines to experience the system. But Filipinos bringing their old ways to the land of new beginnings could only weaken the moral fabric of some people.
This same political system that denies equality and justice for all protects families like the Ampatuans and the Macapagal-Arroyos. Two years later, these families still have not been put on trial for their alleged crimes. But impunity in the Philippines or among Filipinos does not always concern massacres and other forms of killings. In Bander’s case, the well-connected Filipinos ask simple favors, perhaps with a bribe, such as placing a foreign lawyer of good standing in the Bureau of Immigration’s watch list. At the same time, the lawyer receives an arrest warrant for a manufactured molestation of a fictitious woman.
And Mr. Laigo is still permitted by his Balita Media patrons to act with impunity by their continued support of him. Mr. Laigo, who is the executive editor of Weekend Balita, covered the Ninoy Aquino International Airport beat as a photographer routinely, among others, during his newspaper career in Manila in the 1980s until the early 90s. After he arrived with his family in the United States, after a newspaper-editing stint in the US territory of Saipan, Laigo, was hired as editor of the now defunct World Reporter, a midweek broadsheet weekly newspaper published by businessman-CPA Oscar Jornacion.
A few years later, he and a couple of account executives of California Examiner (also published by Jornacion) and World Reporter, secretly founded a weekly tabloid newspaper called Diyaryo Pilipino. It was funded by a longtime friend of one of the original founders. Laigo eventually bought out the original owner, and the tabloid flourished under his editorship and management, until it too was forced to fold up a few years ago.
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