Photo: Tulfo’s Facebook page" width="100%" />
The Philippine Supreme Court (SC) yesterday affirmed the libel conviction of columnist Raffy Tulfo in connection to a 2003 piece on the tabloid Abante Tonite where he insinuated that a businessman asked a government official to stop a tax fraud investigation.
Aside from Raffy, also convicted were Abante Tonite publisher Allen Macasaet and editors Nicolas V. Quijano Jr., Janet Bay, Jesus P. Galang, Randy Hagos, Jeany Lacorte, and Venus Tandoc. They were ordered by the SC to pay businessman Michael Guy, the petitioner, PHP500,000 (US$9,769) in moral damages, PHP1 million (US$19,539) in exemplary damages, and PHP211,200 (US$4,126) worth of attorney’s fees.
The respondents have all been previously convicted by a regional trial court in Makati City and the Court of Appeals (CA) but Guy brought the case to the SC because he wanted the moral damages to be increased to PHP5 million (US$97,694) from the PHP500,000 (US$9,767) that the CA ordered Raffy and his colleagues to pay. Guy said a higher amount was necessary because his business suffered greatly from Raffy’s false report.
However, the SC decided not to increase it because it ruled that the businessman failed to prove that he lost millions of pesos in income because of Raffy’s allegations.
Raffy belongs to the infamous Tulfo family, whose members are known for their macho tough-guy image and vocal support of President Rodrigo Duterte. His brothers Erwin Tulfo and Ben Tulfo are broadcasters, while his wife Jocelyn Tulfo is a newly-elected party-list representative. His sister Wanda Teo was Duterte’s former tourism secretary while his brother Ramon Tulfo is the president’s envoy to China.
The article that led to this conviction appeared on March 24, 2004 in Raffy’s Abante Tonite column called Shoot to Kill.
In it, Tulfo alleged that Guy went to the house of then-Finance Secretary Juanita Amatong to discuss the tax refunds he allegedly received from the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Raffy alleged that Amatong’s staff at the Department of Finance (DOF) were investigating Guy in connection to these tax refunds.
Raffy alleged that after speaking with Guy, Amatong called her staff at the DOF to order them to halt their supposed investigation on the businessman.
The SC’s decision on the case, written by Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, says that while journalists act as “sentinels who keep watch over the actions of the government,” they have to exercise “a high degree of professionalism in their work, regardless of the subject of their stories.”
The court also said that journalists must take responsibility for the accuracy of what they write and should verify all information before releasing them to the public. It said that Raffy and Abante Tonite‘s team “should have been more circumspect in what they published. They are not media practitioners with a lack of social following; their words reverberate.”
The Tulfos have been involved in a string of controversies recently, such as when Erwin was lambasted for threatening to slap and drown Social Work Secretary Rolando Bautista in a toilet after the latter refused to immediately grant him a radio interview. After attacking Bautista on his radio show, Erwin was told by the police to surrender his firearms because his license for them had expired. The authorities also removed his police escorts as well as the ones assigned to Raffy and Jocelyn.
Last year, Teo, who was then tourism secretary, was accused of paying PHP60 million (US$1.146 million) in ad spots to Kilos Pronto, a television show his brothers Erwin and Ben, who is also the producer, co-hosted.
Teo denied that there was a conflict of interest in her decision to pay Ben the big sum, but she ended up resigning from her post in May 2018. Ben remains adamant that he won’t return the money to the government.
