Gov. Juan N. Babauta and government personnel who responded to Rota during the Pongsona disaster have yet to settle unpaid rent to a car rental company, nearly two years after the supertyphoon devastated the island.<\/p>\n
This information cropped up in a Superior Court civil lawsuit filed by Venture Transportation, Inc., which does business as Budget Rent A Car of Guam, against the Emergency Management Office.<\/p>\n
Unpaid rent by Babauta reached $1,251, the company claimed. The rent covered the period from Dec. 10 to 23 in 2002.<\/p>\n
Budget also billed the EMO for Public Works Secretary John Reyes\u2019 rent worth $1,015.90, as well as for then Commerce Secretary and now Finance Secretary Fermin Atalig\u2019s rent, which amounted to $646.60. The government already settled these amounts.<\/p>\n
In all, the remaining balance for car rental services being assessed against the EMO remains at $7,287.70.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s lawyer, S. Joshua Berger, sued the EMO for breach of contract. It seeks to collect on the outstanding balance plus interests, besides costs incidental to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
The EMO rented several vehicles from Budget when they responded to the disaster area on Dec. 2002. The rent covered the period from Dec. 10 to Jan. 2, 2003.<\/p>\n
The agency allegedly failed to settle the obligation, even if Budget billed it as early as May 2003.<\/p>\n
By this time, though, the EMO had already settled some $5,206.45 out of the total billing of $12,494.15 for car rental services, the company said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Juan N. Babauta and government personnel who responded to Rota during the Pongsona disaster have yet to settle unpaid rent to a car rental company, nearly two years after the supertyphoon devastated the island.<\/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-83009","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\/83009","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=83009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83009\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}