It is a joke for Solicitor General Jose Calida to claim that it was only recently during the impeachment proceedings that the government learned that Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno failed to submit all of her prior years’ SALNs when she was a professor in the UP College of Law.

Calida asserts that the one-year prescriptive period must be reckoned from this “belated” discovery.

This is a convenient ruse to avoid the inevitable that the filing of the subject quo warranto petition against Sereno has long expired under the Rules of Court.

It is on record that Sereno asked the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) to excuse her from producing her prior SALNs, and the JBC proceeded to include her in the shortlist of nominees for appointment as Chief Justice.

From said time during the JBC deliberations or upon her appointment or assumption to office in August 2012, the one-year prescriptive period started to run.

As early as in the case of Agcaoili vs. Suguitan on February 13, 1926, the Supreme Court has debunked the plea of the government that the statute of limitation cannot be invoked against the State in quo warranto proceedings.

EDCEL C. LAGMAN