Senate Vice President Pete P. Reyes has called on his fellow lawmakers to conduct an oversight hearing on the former Marianas Public Lands Authority.<\/p>\n
Reyes maintained that although MPLA had been abolished and replaced by the Department of Public Lands, the Senate should not allow agency’s former officials to go scot-free for irregularities that they might have committed.<\/p>\n
“The new law does not prevent us from conducting an oversight on MPLA. Anything illegal should be investigated and anyone found to have committed an illegal act should be prosecuted. I don’t want to name names, but they know who they are,” the Saipan senator said.<\/p>\n
The oversight would focus on past action the former officers and employees of Public Lands, he said.<\/p>\n
Reyes also said that he had some documents showing corruption within the former MPLA. He intends to submit these documents to the Attorney General’s Office.<\/p>\n
MPLA was abolished on Feb. 22, 2006.<\/p>\n
Public Law 15-2, which allowed for the transfer of all MPLA functions to the Department of Public Lands, cited a constitutional provision as basis for abolishing the MPLA as an autonomous agency.<\/p>\n
Article XI Section 4(f) of the Constitution, as amended in 1986, provided that the functions previously performed by the Marianas Public Lands <\/p>\n
Corporation should be transferred to the executive branch of the government after its dissolution.<\/p>\n
P.L. 15-2 also noted that “the Commonwealth’s experience with the management of public lands over the years has demonstrated the need for additional controls.”<\/p>\n
The Department of Public Lands is now undergoing a transition period under the leadership of interim Secretary John Del Rosario. (Agnes E. Donato)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Senate Vice President Pete P. Reyes has called on his fellow lawmakers to conduct an oversight hearing on the former Marianas Public Lands Authority.<\/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-98365","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\/98365","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=98365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}