Fiscal cleared in 2012 extortion case

Senior Deputy State Prosecutor Severino Gaña Jr. has been cleared in the case involving the extortion of a litigant in his office in the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2012.

In a seven- page decision received by the DOJ yesterday, the Office of the Ombudsman dismissed the administrative complaint for grave misconduct and conduct prejudicial to the best interest of the service filed by Nuriza Abeja.

The case against Gaña was filed after one of his staff, Mutya Santiago, was arrested by National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) agents in an entrapment in August 2012 for supposedly extorting P250,000 from Abeja in an adultery case.

The ombudsman gave weight to Gaña’s defense “that he was not privy to the supposed transactions between complainant and Mutya.”

The ombudsman also pointed out Abeja never claimed to have talked Gaña in person regarding the alleged payoff.

“Even the complaint affidavit shows that the alleged transaction was between complainant and Mutya only. Also, during the entrapment operation, the NBI operatives recovered the boodle money from Mutya,” the ruling stressed.

In his counter- affidavit, Gaña explained that he met Abeja, who introduced herself as a member of a nongovernment organization affiliated with UNICEF, in one of the programs of the Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force he headed in 2006 to 2011.

Gaña said he thought that Abeja’s visits were only by reason of their interactions in the programs but she never told him that she had a case on appeal before the DOJ.

The robbery by extortion case filed against Santiago has been dismissed by the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 54.