{"id":125380,"date":"2008-08-18T21:37:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-18T21:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/b10e52ec-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e"},"modified":"2008-08-18T21:37:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-18T21:37:00","slug":"b10e5303-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/b10e5303-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e\/","title":{"rendered":"Santos resigns, Villagomez business as usual"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>James A. Santos resigned yesterday as Commerce Secretary, while it was business-as-usual for Lt. Gov. Timothy P. Villagomez.<\/p>\n<p>Press secretary Charles Reyes Jr. told Saipan Tribune that Santos voluntarily resigned yesterday, Monday.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe reason is because of the situation\u2014the federal indictment. I think he feels that he\u2019s going to be a distraction on the administration,\u201d Reyes said.<\/p>\n<p>Gov. Benigno R. Fitial tapped Deputy Commerce Secretary Michael Ada as the new Commerce chief.<\/p>\n<p>Villagomez reported to his office yesterday at 8am. He left at 11:30am, according to Lt. Governor\u2019s legal counsel Teresa K. Kim.<\/p>\n<p>Kim said Villagomez was set to attend a personal meeting at 1pm yesterday, then have an official meeting.<\/p>\n<p>Villagomez, Santos, his wife Joaquina Villagomez Santos, and former Commonwealth Utilities Corp. executive director Anthony Guerrero were indicted on charges of allegedly conspiring to bilk CMMI and U.S. governments out of thousands of dollars through business deals involving needless chemical purchases for CUC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>James A. Santos resigned yesterday as Commerce Secretary, while it was business-as-usual for Lt. Gov. Timothy P. Villagomez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}