G.R. No. L-37631 - Santiago Nicolas, et al. vs. Court of Appeals, et al.
Manila
THIRD DIVISION
G.R. No. L-37631 October 12, 1987
SANTIAGO NICOLAS, ANTONIO MATAWARAN, ALBINO CARREON, VENANCIO MATAWARAN, LUZ FRANCO and AMPARO DIONISIO,petitioners,
vs.
HONORABLE COURT OF APPEALS, LORENZO G. VALENTIN, Justice of the Peace of Bulacan, PROVINCIAL SHERIFF and ANASTACIO MADLANGSAKAY,respondents.
FERNAN,J.:
This is a petition for review of the decision of the Court of Appeals
Briefly, the facts are as follows.
In 1951, respondent Anastacio Madlangsakay [a.k.a. Anastacio M. Sakay] rice dealer, married to Lourdes Manuel bought from Felipe Garcia three parcels of land with a combined area of 8,955 square meters situated in Barrio Matungao, Bulacan, Bulacan and known as Lot Nos. 6, 7 and 8 of Plan PSU 28714. Transfer Certificate of Title No. T-8012 was issued on October 19, 1951 in the name of Anastacio M. Sakay.
Negotiations begun for the sale of Lot No. 8 to petitioner- tenants and in an affidavit dated August 26, 1958, Madlangsakay promised to subdivide the land among them at P0.70 per square meter.2Nothing came out of the negotiations.
Soon thereafter, the relationship between the new owner and the occupants soured and quickly deteriorated into a series of legal squabbles which culminated in the present controversy.
On April 26, 1961, petitioners filed an amended complaint in the then Court of First Instance of Bulacan against respondent Madlangsakay to quiet title over Lot. No. 8 [Civil Case No. 2355]. They alleged that in an affidavit dated August 26, 1958, Madlangsakay agreed to sell the property to them at 0.70 per square meter;3that pursuant to that affidavit, Madlangsakay executed several deeds of sale transferring different but uniform portions of the land in favor of Venancio Matawaran, Albino Carreon, Antonio Matawaran, Santiago Nicolas and Amparo Dionisio;4that on November 21, 1960, Madlangsakay executed another affidavit to facilitate the registration of the deeds of sale, which in due time were accomplished under Act 3344, thus making petitioners owners in fee simple;5that in 1961, in the exercise of their rights as owners, they cut and cleared the bamboo groves near their houses, prompting Madlangsakay to file five criminal cases for robbery against them which they, in turn, countered with separate criminal complaints for perjury against Madlangsakay;6that despite the sale, Madlangsakay persisted in encroaching on their rights by gathering the fruits on the subject land and selling them; and that the pending criminal actions between them before Judge Lorenzo Valentin, Bulacan Justice of the Peace, would remain unresolved until the real ownership of the property was determined, hence the action to quiet title.
In his amended answer, Madlangsakay averred that the deeds of sale and the affidavits of November 21, 1960 which he purportedly executed were all forgeries and that the land in question, being conjugal property, registered under the Torrens system and mortgaged with the Philippine National Bank, could not be alienated without his wife's consent.
The trial court upheld Madlangsakay. It dismissed the complaint, nullified the deeds of sale and the affidavit of November 21, 19607for being spurious and ordered the cancellation of their registration in the Registry of Deeds. It further awarded Madlangsakay actual and moral damages in the amounts of P1,000.00 and P5,000.00 respectively, attorney's fees of P3,000.00 and litigation costs.8
On appeal the Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's decision in the main but fixed the moral damages at P3,000.00, the handwriting expert's fees at P1,000.00 and attorney's fees at P1,000.00.9
Hence, the present recourse.
As earlier mentioned, petitioners' asserted interest over the disputed property is based on the alleged absolute sale of the same to them by respondent Madlangsakay.
An examination of the instruments evidencing the sale discloses the following: The deeds in favor of Santiago Nicolas and Amparo Dionisio were dated August 12, 1960 and notarized by Atty. Genaro Arribe in Manila on the same date,
On petitioners' claim arising from the sale, the trial court, guided by the testimony of handwriting expert Jose del Rosario, witness for respondent, declared:
Looking at the documents themselves, the questioned as well as the genuine signatures appear to be the same in general appearance. However, the enlarged photographs of the same signatures presented in Exhibits 6 and 7 of the defendants and Exhibits XX-1 of the plaintiffs reveal marked differences between the two sets of signatures.
As seen in the enlarged photographs, the first difference between the two sets of signatures is the discernible tremor in the initial stroke of the capital letter "A" in the questioned signatures. There are no such tremors in the genuine signatures, which show fluidity of movement. In the questioned signatures, the cross of the letter "t" is heavy at the end of the line; in the genuine signatures, this cross tapers towards the end. In the genuine signatures the "s" in the Anastacio although often only vestigial is always discernible; in most of the questioned signatures the "s" is entirely omitted. The middle initial "M" in the questioned signatures has a tendency to be written with a loop at the bottom of the first staff; this does not occur in the genuine signatures. Furthermore, the "M" in the genuine signatures is written gracefully while in the questioned signatures it is very ungainly. The last difference is in the writing of the tail of the letter "y" in Sakay. In the questioned signatures the tail is written in a straight abrupt line and is heavy at the end; in the genuine signatures it is often written with a curve in the stem and is always tapering at the end.
It is plain, furthermore, that the signature "Anastacio M. Sakay" in the questioned documents were written by only one person, as the characteristics pointed to above appear in all of them. These signatures were written by an expert forger. Without the aid of enlarged photographs they can easily pass for real signatures of Anastacio Madlangsakay.
The Court of Appeals, agreeing with the conclusion of the lower court as to the fabricated signatures of Madlangsakay in the assailed documents, went further and held:
In this particular case, however, we agree with the conclusion of the lower court as to the falsity of the questioned documents, but for the reasons other than those advanced by the courta quo,which are:
... There are only four exemplars or standard signatures "relied upon by the lower court as basis of comparison with the questioned signatures appearing on the deeds of sale, marked as Exhs. A, B, C, D and E", thus limiting the scope of analysis between the two sets of signatures.
From the various documentary evidence before us, however, we picked 14 documents bearing admittedly genuine signatures of appellee Madlangsakay, to wit:
Exhs. F, M, N, O, P, S, T and U, and Exhs. CC, 7-a, 7-b, 7-d, 9 and 10,
Exhs. CC, 7-a, 7-b, 7-c [four copies], 7-d, 9 and 10, like the questioned documents, were signed with a fountain pen in fluid ink, but while the letters of the signatures in the former are thin and characterized with fluidity in the movement of the writing, all the letters in the latter are thick and evincing signs of hesitancy on the part of the writer. Generally, because a fountain pen is sharp pointed, slow movement of the writer will cause the pen to emit more ink on the paper; whereas when the writer's movement is swift, the letters impressed are thin. The thick script on the questioned documents would therefore tend to indicate that they were written in a very slow movement; which in turn would give rise to the supposition that whoever wrote Madlangsakay's name was not Madlangsakay himself.
Again, in all the questioned documents, the capital letter "A" in the word "Anastacio" is not aligned with the rest of the characters of the signature. In all the documents admittedly bearing Madlangsakay's genuine signatures the said capital letter "A" is aligned with the rest of the signature.
As we see it, the only plausible legal question in the present appeal is whether respondent court erred in concluding that the deeds of sale on which petitioners have anchored their claim are spurious and therefore non-existent in contemplation of law.
This Court finds that there is substantial and convincing evidence that the deeds of sale, Exhs. A, B, D and E and the affidavit, Exh. G, were in fact falsified as to warrant full affirmance of the decision under appeal. Strongly indicative of their fake character is not only the physical manifestation of imitation, but also the questionable circumstances under which the documents were prepared and executed. Consider the following:
Of the two notaries public, Atty. Genaro Arribe and Francisco Saligumba, before whom the aforementioned documents were acknowledged, only Atty. Saligumba took the stand. But Saligumba admitted now knowing the parties personally nor the instrumental witnesses who appeared before him. They, according to Saligumba, just walked into his office in Manila and requested him to notarize the deeds of transfer. Nor did he know Madlangsakay. He just relied on the word of petitioners that the person who introduced himself as Madlangsakay was truly Madlangsakay. When asked during the trial to Identify the vendor, he merely answered that he could not recall respondent Madlangsakay's appearance.
Secondly, the parcel of land in question was registered under Act 496 in the name of Madlangsakay under TCT No. 8012.ℒαwρhi৷The entry in the certificate of title reads: "is registered in accordance with the provision of the Land Registration Act in the name Anastacio M. Sakay, ..., married to Lourdes Manuel."
The questioned instruments, however, invariably recited that "the property is not registered under Act 496 or the Spanish Mortgage law ... ." What reason could have impelled Maglangsakay to state such a blatant falsehood about his title when he did not stand to profit thereby. In fact, by so declaring, he risked criminal prosecution for perjury.
Thirdly, it was most unlikely that Madlangsakay would have sold the land in 1960 to petitioners, or to anybody else for that matter, because it was not his alone to dispose of. The land is a conjugal property and, as such, it could not be alienated without the conformity of his wife. Moreover, it was heavily mortgaged with the PNB, Malolos branch, and could not be transferred without the bank's consent. As a matter of fact, the transfer certificate of title was then in the possession of said bank.
Finally, it is titled property and any conveyance affecting said property must be registered under Act 496 and not under Act 3344 as was done by petitioners in the case at bar.
A careful reading of the decision of the Bulacan trial court as well as the decision of the Appellate Court reveals that all pertinent evidence available were assiduously considered. It is not the function of this Court to analyze or weigh such evidence all over again. Our jurisdiction is limited to reviewing errors of law which might have been committed by the lower court.
WHEREFORE,the decision appealed from is hereby affirmed. In view of the length of time that the case at bar has remained pending, this decision is immediately executory. Costs against petitioners.
SO ORDERED.
Gutierrez, Jr., Feliciano, Bidin and Cortes, JJ., concur.
Footnotes