Environmental activist group Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan PNE) slammed the Office of the Ombudsman’s decision suspending Brooke’s Point, Palawan Mayor Jean Feliciano for grave abuse of authority.

The Ombudsman ordered Feliciano suspended for one year without pay for stopping the operations of Ipilan Nickel Corporation (INC) and destroying its mining properties in 2017. The Ombudsman said Feliciano took “undue advantage of her official position.”

INC is a subsidiary of listed firm Global Ferronickel.

“This alarming Ombudsman decision gives further precedent for illegal mining operations by big business to run roughshod over our environment and operate with impunity,” said Leon Dulce, national coordinator of Kalikasan PNE, in a statement on Saturday, June 19.

Feliciano, who is also an environmental lawyer, shut down the operations of INC in May 2017 after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) revoked the company’s environmental compliance certificate (ECC) in December 2016.

INC appealed DENR’s decision, but Feliciano went on to demolish the company’s properties in the mining site in February 2018.

In June 2020, the DENR released a resolution recalling its previous decision and confirming the validity of INC’s ECC. This became one of the grounds for the Ombudsman’s decision.

However, Kalikasan PNE questioned the logic of allowing the mining firm to operate on status quo when its ECC suspension was facing a motion for reconsideration.

“Ipilan Nickel has in fact cut up to 25,000 trees already – do we wait for 25,000 more trees to be cut in our last ecological frontier while the motion for reconsideration is pending? This move is illogical, immoral, and unjust, and should be immediately reversed,” Dulce said.

The group added that the suspension of INC’s ECC in 2016 should have already been regarded as proof that the company poses environmental risks and that its operations should cease and desist immediately.

Kalikasan PNE called the Ombudsman’s decision “a precedent for illegal mining impunity.”

“We are seeing more of this pro-mining bullying pulpit recently amid President Rodrigo Duterte’s traitorous reversal on mining. Aside from Mayor Feliciano, anti-mining village officials in Nueva Vizcaya have also been earlier suspended on the same basis, and local governments with local codes prohibiting mining such as in South Cotabato are being pressured through court challenges,” Dulce said. – Rappler.com