THE Justice Department on Thursday started its preliminary investigation into the P9.56-billion tax evasion case against the owners and officials of Mighty Corp. for allegedly using counterfeit tax stamps on their cigarettes to evade paying taxes.
Mighty Corp. owner Alexander Wongchuking submitted his counter-affidavit to the government prosecutors and denied the allegations made by the Bureau of Internal Revenue against him and Mighty Corp. in its complaint in March.
Three other respondents”•former Armed Forces deputy chief-of-staff and retired Lt. Gen. Edilberto Adan, Mighty Corp.’s president; retired Judge Oscar Barrientos, company executive vice president; and company treasurer Ernesto Victa—also appeared and submitted their counter-affidavits.
The respondents submitted boxes of documents to the prosecutors, and BIR lawyers were also present during the hearing.
The hearing started around 2:30 p.m. and lasted for less than an hour, but it came as a surprise as the reporters were kept in the dark about the scheduled proceedings. It was held simultaneously with a press conference of Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II.
Aguirre’s office and the department’s prosecutors had repeatedly told reporters that no subpoena had yet been issued on Mighty Corp. and no hearing had been set.
The department conducted the hearing even as the BIR readied more complaints against Mighty Corp., accusing it of trying to evade paying P27 billion to P30 billion in taxes following several raids on its warehouses.
The BIR filed its charges after confiscating master cases of cigarettes worth P2.3 billion bearing fake tax stamps from Mighty Corp.’s warehouse at the San Simon Industrial Park in Pampanga earlier this month.
The bureau said the mere possession of the cigarette packs with fake tax stamps was in itself a violation of the law.
The bureau said it found that 87.5 percent of the 66,281 master cases containing 33,140,500 cigarette packs in the warehouse had fake stamps that did not contain multi-layer security features.
The bureau pegged the aggregate excise tax liability of the tobacco firm at P9.564 billion. The agency is also preparing to file at least three more tax evasion cases against Mighty Corp.
Internal Revenue Commissioner Caesar Dulay earlier said the BIR would give priority to filing charges against Mighty Corp. It said separate cases would be filed before the Justice department for each of the series of raids that yielded Mighty cigarette packs with fake tax stamps.
The Bureau of Customs says it had also discovered counterfeit stamps affixed on Mighty Corp.’s products seized in Zamboanga, General Santos City, Cebu, Tacloban City and Bulacan in the past two months.
