Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said Friday it\u2019s best to obtain the legal advice of Attorney General Edward Manibusan to determine whether he as governor or the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. board of trustees chairperson has the authority to remove Fermin Atalig from the board.<\/p>\n
This comes soon after Sen. Teresita A. Santos (Ind-Rota) accused CHCC board of trustees chair Lauri Ogumoro of usurping Torres\u2019 authority to appoint or remove board members when she removed Atalig from the board last year. Santos had described Atalig\u2019s ouster as \u201chighly questionable,\u201d \u201cillegal and unconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked to comment during his Friday radio news briefing, Torres said it would be better to refrain from making a comment as to who has the authority to remove a board member. \u201cI think that would be my position at this point and to respect that process,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The governor said they will have a better view as to who has the authority possibly this week, then they will go from there.<\/p>\n
CHCC chief executive officer Esther L. Mu\u00f1a also refused to comment about the issue at the same news briefing.<\/p>\n
In Ogumoro\u2019s Sept. 18, 2020, termination letter to Atalig, she cited Atalig\u2019s alleged failure to attend board meetings as the reason for his ouster.<\/p>\n
But Santos said that, according to Atalig, he only got sporadic notices of scheduled board meetings and that he always attended those meeting when he was informed beforehand.<\/p>\n
Santos said Atalig never knew he was no longer a board member after Sept. 17, 2020, until he received Ogumoro\u2019s letter by mail on Jan. 5, 2021.<\/p>\n
Ogumoro has yet to issue a public statement about the issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said Friday it\u2019s best to obtain the legal advice of Attorney…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":341320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[86],"class_list":["post-341273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-oag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341273","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\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}