Prosecution picks at Corona’s P11M liability

Day 10 of the Chief Justice’s Impeachment Trial took a turn toward greater ambiguity as far as evidentiary relevance is concerned when the Prosecution presented a witness to prove that a corporation that Corona borrowed money from, had already “died” in the corporate sense.

Atty. Benito Cataran, a director at the Securities and Exchange Commission, testified that the certificate of business registration of Basa-Guidote Enterprises, Inc., a company that lent 11 million pesos to Corona, had been revoked before it lent money to the Chief Justice.

Senator-Judge Allan Peter Cayetano opined that a company’s “life span” can go beyond the effectivity date of the revocation of its license to operate, or in this case, to lend money to a borrower. This, he said, is not like claiming that one borrowed money from someone who had died, in which case, the transaction becomes dubious.

As floor deliberations continued, the senator-judges, most of them adept at corporate law, were in agreement that 1] any company whose SEC certificate has been revoked can, in fact, continue to operate; and 2] that the SEC witness and evidence that the Prosecution presented on Day 10, was irrelevant to the Article of Impeachment being heard, with Senator-Judge Joker Arroyo admonishing the both Defense and Prosecution lawyers to refrain from “wasting their time” with irrelevance.