Philex gives aid to complainant sans legal duty

April 21, 2018 Provincial

TUBA, BENGUET – Philex Mining Corp. has won a case on a complaint for damages filed by a resident at its Padcal mine camp in this town over the injuries he had sustained in a “fortuitous event,” in 2010, following the generosity that the gold-and-copper producer had done toward the complainant.
“Wherefore, foregoing premises considered, this case against defendant, Philex Mining Corporation, is hereby dismissed,” Cecilia Corazon Dulay-Archog, acting presiding judge of Branch 8 of the Regional Trial Court, in La Trinidad, Benguet, said. “The dismissal is, however, without prejudice to any humanitarian service it can still voluntarily render to the plaintiff.”
Eduardo Aratas, manager of the Legal Div., in Philex Mining’s Padcal mine, said the company had extended financial assistance to Bryner Genesis Obonan amounting to P50,000 and granted his family an interest-free loan of P90,000, even if it had “no legal obligation to do so.”
He added that Obonan had been nursed back to health at the Baguio General Hospital, in Baguio City, following an initial confinement at the company’s Sto.NiñoHospital, in Tuba’s Sitio Padcal, Brgy. Camp 3.
In her five-page decision released Tuesday, April 17, the judge also said, “[The] defendant, through its officers, need not be too onion-skinned to take offense on Bryner’s parent’s act of filing the instant suit. With people of such level of education and stature in life, [the] plaintiff’s mother and guardian may have been ill-advised.”
Filed in September 2011 by the 12-year-old Obonan, who was represented by his mother and guardian, Mercedes Obonan, the case stemmed from an accident on Sept. 5, 2010, when the plaintiff and his friends were in a shed inside the mine camp waiting for a company bus that would ferry them to a church where they would practice for their confirmation rites.
In its memorandum submitted to the court, Philex Mining said a large boulder was dislodged from its base at a mountaintop, rolling down and hitting the waiting shed. Bryner’s friends were able to escape, leaving him as the sole victim. He suffered bruises all over his body while his skull was fractured, giving him brain injuries that have affected his motor senses severely.
The plaintiff’s witness and mother said the boulder had been dislodged due to the defendant’s exploration and blasting activities. But the defendants’ witnesses attributed to “natural environmental causes” the rolling boulder that had hit Obonan, whose father works as a laborer at Padcal mine.
But Dulay-Archog said, “Notwithstanding, the defendant, which is known for its well-advertised and -publicized contributions to community development, infrastructure projects, scholarships and humanitarian endeavors, may magnanimously opt to make Bryner its recipient and beneficiary. After all, it claims that it is a company which cares.”
“The assistance that we had extended to the Obonan family was a gesture of sympathy, as the company cares for the welfare of its employees and their immediate families,” Aratas said in an interview. “Philex Mining could have given more if not for the unreasonable and exorbitant amount of money that the Obonan family had demanded against it.” PR / ABN