THE SUPREME Court (SC) has ordered the disbarment of a lawyer for misusing a client’s manager’s check to settle the obligation related to another case.
In an 11-page en banc decision made available online recently, the high court ordered lawyer Nini Cruz disbarred and her name stricken off the roll of attorneys.
She was also ordered to refund PHP2 million to her client, the complainant, representing the manager’s check plus interest from 2015 until full payment.
“Consistent with her dishonest acts, respondent (Cruz) got hold of the manager’s check through deceitful assurances,” the court said, adding that the lawyer “deceived (the) complainant when she impressed upon the latter the need for such bond despite the prior dismissal (of the case and) then defrauded complainant by misappropriating the latter’s manager’s check as settlement for the obligation of another client in another case”.
“In doing so, she likewise deceived the RTC (Regional Trial Court) into believing that complainant’s manager’s check was issued for a different civil case, to which complainant was not a party,” the court said.
In ordering her disbarment, the court noted that the lawyer failed to give her side for four years.
“Failing to refute the allegations leveled against her despite several opportunities to do so, respondent is either not at all interested in clearing her name or simply has nothing to say in her defense”.
Complainant Gracita Domingo-Acaton engaged Cruz’s services in 2013 for the reacquisition of her ancestral home in West Bajac-Bajac, Olongapo City which had been foreclosed by the Philippine National Bank (PNB).
The lawyer convinced her client that the property could still be bought back from PNB by initiating a petition for consignation with the RTC.
According to law experts, consignation is a deposit which a debtor makes of the thing that he owes, into the hands of a third person, and under the authority of a court of justice.
Cruz, a former prosecutor at the Olongapo City RTC, also claimed she sought the advice of the head of the asset acquired department of PNB and she was told she had a good chance of buying back Acaton’s property.
She then instructed her client to prepare a bond through a manager’s check in favor of PNB to be sent to the RTC where the petition for consignation would be filed for safekeeping.
Cruz was also paid PHP150,000 for filing and professional fees.
A few months passed and suspecting something amiss, Acaton asked for a copy of the RTC’s acknowledgment receipt for the check, which Cruz failed to produce.
Upon verification with the RTC, Acaton learned that the check was indeed deposited to the RTC’s fiduciary trust fund but was encashed in September 2014.
The complainant was informed by the RTC that the case she filed had already been dismissed in July.
The court also informed her that the check was paid by Cruz as a compromise agreement in another case where she was also the lawyer.
Acaton eventually sued Cruz for estafa and qualified theft in July 2016. ( Benjamin Pulta)
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