Under Marcos 2 admin, a colossal P29 billion to be given to Cojuangcos
The biggest award ever granted by a Philippine court
THIS P28.5 billion boon was ordered to be paid to the Hacienda Luisita Inc. of the Cojuangco clan in an April 25, 2025 decision by the Court of Appeals Special Twelfth Division, as payment for having their 4,500-hectare sugar plantation placed under agrarian reform in 1989.
That’s 150 times the P196 million that the Supreme Court under the late Chief Justice Renato Corona and other government agencies had fiercely believed was the compensation that the Cojuangcos should get for their lands that were put under agrarian reform.
The P28 billion is by far the biggest ever monetary award given by any Philippine court, dwarfing the P5 billion award involving two Japanese firms ordered by the Supreme Court in 2020.
That is certainly ironic, and even weird.
Two Cojuangcos became Philippine presidents in the modern era — the late Corazon C. Aquino and her son Benigno Aquino 3rd. This was the core of the so-called Yellows that had been the archenemy of the dictator Marcos, whom its members believe had their political leader, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., assassinated in 1981.
Its patriarch was Cory Aquino’s brother, Jose Cojuangco Jr., who however appears to have stepped down from the political arena. The clan’s political leader now is Ninoy’s nephew, Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aguirre Aquino 4th, who landed second in the senatorial race last May.
If the decision of the Court of Appeals (CA) is not reversed by the Supreme Court, the clan will have the colossal resources to again try to rule the country.
The CA handed down the ruling last April 25, just days before the May 11 elections, that government should pay the Cojuangco clan P28.5 billion as recompense for their Hacienda Luisita sugar plantation being put up for distribution to its former tenant farmers.
While the court is obviously an independent branch of government – the judicial — I suspect it points to the political alliance of the Yellow forces with the Marcos-Romualdez clan, in order to stop Sara Duterte from becoming president in 2028. The P28.5 billion windfall will certainly resurrect the once-mighty political and financial power of the Cojuangcos, and consequently the Yellow forces.
Shameful
This would explain the immoral and shameful silence of the Yellow forces, and its spokesmen, over the corruption of the Bongbong Marcos regime, against whose father it had fought for decades, resulting in the deaths and imprisonment of many of its activists.
The award is an abomination, a total reversal of decisions of the Supreme Court, of several government agencies, and of a regional trial court on how much the clan should be paid for their land-reformed lands.
Filipinos of all political persuasions should condemn this atrocity, as it is us taxpayers who will be paying the P28.5 billion to the Cojuangco clan, the epitome of the elite landlord class that has controlled this country since the Spanish colonization. (The three members of the CS Twelfth Special Division are chairperson Marie Christine Azcarraga Jacob, appointed by Aquino 3rd in 2012; Raymond Lauigan, appointed by President Duterte in 2020, and Ferdinand Baylon, by Marcos 2nd last August.)
The Supreme Court in 2011 had effectively ruled that the “just compensation” for the Cojuangcos for its Hacienda Luisita, the valuation they themselves made, was P196.6 million, the price that Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) bought the land from Tarlac Development Corp, (Tadeco) which it also owned. The Cojuangcos, however, have rejected this compensation as “unjust.”
In 2013, the Land Bank of the Philippines declared that compensation for the land amounted to P471 million, consisting of P304 million principal, ₱167.4 million interest to pay for the years the clan had not been paid. The bank deposited the amount in cash and bonds in the HLI”s account. Even as the company officially rejected the legal compensation for the land, it encashed it.
Affirmed
In 2015 the Department of Agrarian Reform Adjudication Board affirmed the Land Bank valuation of ₱471 million as just compensation, and rejected HLI’s claims for additional interest, for what it claimed was the unpaid portion of its computation, which should be P1.2 billion. In 2023, the regional trial court, acting as Special Agrarian Court of Tarlac City, Branch 63, dismissed HLI’s petition for additional compensation and interest.
But in April 2025, just before the May elections, and three years into Marcos 2nd’s term, a decision of the Court of Appeal Special Twelfth Division was like a bolt of lightning from nowhere.
It reversed the rulings of the Supreme Court, the agrarian reform adjudication board, and the Tarlac regional trial court. In a brief 35-page decision, released only last week, the CA ordered the DAR and Land Bank to pay HLI ₱28.5 billion, claiming that this was the just compensation for the lands as of April 30, 2025. This amount would be increased to account for interest charges until it is paid.
The CA’s upholding of the HLI’s claim that the land should be valued at P1.2 billion is a red flag that the appellate court could be biased: It didn’t even mention the crucial fact that the corporate vehicle for the Cojuangco’s ownership of the land, Tadeco, had sold the land to the clan’s new corporate vehicle, Hacienda Luisita Corp., at P196.6 million, or P40,000 per hectare.
The Cojuangcos were most probably undervaluing the land to shortchange the tenant farmers, as this would be the basis for the price of HLI’s stocks to be distributed to them. Whether or not that was the case, the Supreme Court in 2011 took that as the valuation of the lands on the basis of which the Cojuangcos would be compensated for distributing these to their tenant farmers.
Data
HLI claimed, which the CA affirmed, that government agencies did not use HLI’s own production data, but instead used industry standard data to arrive at its value. But this was the procedure prescribed by the DAR and the Land Bank, obviously to prevent landlords from exaggerating their production data, in order to increase the valuation of the land they would be compensated for. Strangely, HLI based their entire argument on just two witnesses who vouched for the authenticity of HLI’s production data.
The late Chief Justice Renato Corona had claimed that the Cojuangcos had pressured him to convince the Supreme Court to reverse its 2011 decision so that the compensation would be P1.2 billion, and not P197 million which the majority of the high tribunal’s members concluded.
When Corona refused to bow down to the pressure, President Benigno Aquino 3rd – a Cojuangco as his mother was Corazon Cojuangco Aquino – had Congress file an impeachment complaint to remove him. The Senate trial court found Corona guilty on two counts pertaining to the incompleteness of his statement of net worth, and removed him as chief justice. It would be disclosed later, however, that the Aquino administration had bribed the senators P150 million each in the form of pork barrel funds, raised through the so-called Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP). This unconstitutional program involved hijacking allocations in the budget approved by Congress and directing them to the projects of the senators’ choosing.
Even as Aquino 3rd appointed his handpicked justice Lourdes Sereno to replace Corona, the Hacienda Luisita motives of his move to take out Corona had become widely known that the court didn’t move to amend its 2011 decision.
What Corona’s impeachment could not do, the appeals court did, swallowing hook line and sinker HLI’s claim that the valuation of its land should be P1.2 billion, a huge jump from the P197 million valuation made by government agencies and affirmed by the Supreme Court when the land was subjected to land reform in 1989.
Shocking
More shocking is this: Out of the P28.5 billion that the appeals court ordered the agrarian reform department and the Land Bank to pay the Cojuangcos, 96 percent are the claimed interest on the P1.2 billion valuation from 1989 to 2025 — because the two agencies had not paid what the HLI demanded. The appeals court used as interest rate 12 percent from 1989 to 2013, and 6 percent from 2014 to 2025, higher than the 7 percent average cost of money in the first period and 4 percent in the second.
Why on earth would the Cojuangcos claim interest charges, when all these years they formally rejected the government’s valuations even as they withdrew the P471 million in 2013 (during President Aquino 3rd’s term) that the Land Bank considered was full payment for their lands, and filed cases questioning government’s valuations?
This is lunacy.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t reverse this scandalous decision, it will not only go down in history as the most idiotic court decision ever in the country. It will be a cruel mockery of our decades-in- the-making agrarian reform program.
While lands of most landlord elites in nearly all countries were expropriated or paid less than their market prices, in our country the Cojuangco landlords will be awarded billions of pesos, more than enough for them to earn much more than when they were landlords.
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Under Marcos 2 admin, a colossal P29 billion to be given to Cojuangcos
Source: Breaking News PH
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