This case has been cited 1 times or more.
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2002-02-27 |
BELLOSILLO, J. |
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| On this issue, the respondent Intermediate Appellate Court held x x x x that "[T]he questions of the limited liability of petitioners and entitlement to reimbursement for necessary, useful and ornamental expenses should have been raised by them during the trial and on appeal. For the lower court to consider them now and act as petitioners wish it to would be to vary the terms of a final and executory judgment." We find no reversible error committed by the respondent Intermediate Appellate Court. A review of the records show that the petitioners brought up the matter of their limited liability only at the time of the execution of the judgment, after the same had already become final and executory. The decision of the lower court which granted the private respondents' counterclaims condemned the petitioners, without qualification, to pay certain amounts representing the share of the former in the income of the Carriedo property. The petitioners at that point should have brought up the question which they are now raising x x x x Instead, they allowed the decision to become final and executory without seeking a limitation of their liability. When the decision was returned to the trial court for execution, all that was needed to be done was to carry out the terms of the decision which had already become final and executory. At that stage, it was too late for the petitioners to seek its modification. The petitioners cannot claim that they are being deprived of their property without due process of law since they had all the opportunity to raise the question they are now raising before the decision became final and executory. Neither can they ask this Court to disregard "procedural technicalities" to allow them to assert their claim at this very late date. What is involved here is not a matter of procedural technicality, but the doctrine of finality of judgment. We cannot sanction the procedure adopted by the HLURB, affirmed by the Court of Appeals, in ordering petitioner to settle the expenses for the transfer of title whereby private respondents obtained such relief by filing a mere motion during the execution proceedings. In the case at bar, none of the circumstances which this Court used in the past exist to justify evidentiary hearings of new allegations during the execution of judgment as nonetheless being part of the segmented proceedings in the suit, i.e., a fictional continuation of the trial proper. The instant petition is not one where private respondents are enforcing subsidiary liability of an employer in a criminal case for negligence;[39] nor where the defense or claim sought to be heard on execution has been raised or tried before the trial court;[40] nor where the post-judgment evidentiary hearings are meant to address the impossibility of exacting compliance with the judgment as specified therein.[41] In the instant case, we are not concerned with just varying or replacing the means of executing the Judgment but with attempts to compel an altogether different relief apart from those adjudged in the HLURB Decision. | |||||