Doomed luxury cars at Port Irene get reprieve
By Melvin Gascon
TUGUEGARAO CITY — The more than 800 imported vehicles, including some 100 luxury cars due to be crushed at Port Irene in Santa Ana, Cagayan got a temporary reprieve after their declared owners sought to stop their condemnation and insisted on the legality of their importation.
Lawyer Byron San Pedro, senior deputy administrator of the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (Ceza), said Fenix (Ceza), Inc., the listed importer of the vehicles, has filed an appeal on the directive to destroy the vehicles.
“As a matter of due process, we have given them the chance to explain why the vehicles should not be condemned. But we have to comply with the order from President Duterte,” he said.
Sec. Raul Lambino, Ceza administrator, earlier said he has ordered the destruction of about 800 vehicles that remained impounded at a car lot and warehouse at Port Irene, which were supposedly smuggled into the country.
These cars were what remained of about 1,300 vehicles that arrived at Port Irene in a span of three months, from December 2012 to February 2013.
A shipping manifest of the last shipment in 2013 listed about 53 Mercedes Benz sports cars; 30 Hummers; 21 BMWs of various models; seven Porsches consisting of 911, Boxster and Carrera units; a Ferrari F335 Berlinetta; and a Lamborghini Murcielago.
Ceza officials have yet to disclose the declared total value of the vehicles due to be wrecked.
San Pedro said the Ceza chief has formed the “condemnation committee” that will carry out the legal processes before the crushing of the vehicles, similar to what the Bureau of Customs did last month to smuggled cars in Manila, Cebu and Davao ports.
Part of these processes, San Pedro said, was to give the vehicle owners a chance to explain why the condemnation should not proceed.
Of the total number of vehicles set to be destroyed, only about 35 percent were contested, the Ceza official said.
This writer tried to seek Jaime Escaño, a Ceza board member whose wife Edna has been acting as representative for the vehicle importers, but he did not take calls on his mobile phone.
But Peter Geroue, who owns one of the used car dealing firms at Port Irene, said he will yields to the orders of the President.
“If that is the order of the President, we will not stand in the way; he is our elected leader, and he knows best,” he said.
He, however, denied allegations that the vehicles were smuggled.
In their position paper, representatives of Fenix (Ceza), Inc., the listed importer of the vehicles, maintained that no smuggling was committed as the vehicles remained within the freeport, and that were supposedly not intended to be taken out of the economic zone.
“Their argument may be tenable, but it may not be necessarily believable. For them to say the more than 800 vehicles are to be used within the freeport by only a handful of employees is really ridiculous,” San Pedro said.
On the basis of the committee’s recommendation, Lambino ruled to push through with the disposal of the vehicles, but Fenix filed an appeal with the Ceza board of director.
The appeal will be tackled when the board convenes on March 12, San Pedro said.
“While we respect their rights to exhaust all legal remedies available to them, it must be said that that is an implied defiance of the order of President Duterte — that is, to make sure that these luxury cars will not fall into the same people who imported them in the first place,” he said. MG