G.R. No. 195728 - Paramount Life and General Insurance Corp. vs. Castro

Benjamin Lu Hayco, a former employee of the petitioner company involved in its optical supply business in Sta. Cruz, Manila.

On January 5, 1973, a total of 124 complaints of estafa (alleging violation of Article 315, para. 1-b of the Revised Penal Code) were filed against the respondent by the petitioner company with the Office of the City Fiscal of Manila.
Following the preliminary investigation, the City Fiscal proceeded to file 75 cases of estafa against the respondent before the City Court of Manila, based primarily on similar allegations of misappropriation and conversion of collections made by him from the company’s customers.

Lu Chiong Sun, the owner of the Units Optical Supply Company, filed a civil action for accounting (Civil Case No. 89373) before the Court of First Instance of Manila, alleging that during his hospital confinement from September 27, 1972 to October 30, 1972, the respondent improperly assumed the company’s business functions.
The respondent procured a general power of attorney through fraud, deceit, and machinations, inducing Lu Chiong Sun to affix his signature and thumbprint, which was later used to close Sun’s accounts with the Equitable Banking Corporation and to open new accounts in his own name at the same bank and another.

With the criminal cases pending trial, on May 15, 1974 the respondent filed a petition for prohibition, along with a preliminary injunction, before the Court of First Instance of Manila (Branch XV).
In his petition, the respondent contended that the 75 indictments all stemmed from one single criminal resolution—that is, a continuous criminal act—and thus should be consolidated into one information.
The lower court, however, dismissed the petition on the ground that the different dates and independent nature of the acts of conversion did not amount to a single, continuous crime.

On appeal, the respondent prevailed before the Court of Appeals when, on July 17, 1975, it reversed the lower court’s dismissal.
The appellate decision granted the petition for prohibition and directed the City Fiscal to dismiss the 75 separate criminal cases, consolidate the charges into one information, and file the consolidated case with the proper court.

The estafa charges were based on Article 315, para. 1-b of the Revised Penal Code (RPC), which punishes conversion or misappropriation of funds without the necessity of proving fraud.
The case involves the doctrinal discussion on plurality of crimes, examining the distinctions between “ideal plurality,” “real plurality,” and the doctrine of “continuous crime” as provided under Article 48 of the RPC and relevant jurisprudence.

Whether the seventy-five individual acts of misappropriation by the respondent, occurring on different dates, constitute one continuous crime (delito continuado) or separate, divisible crimes.

Whether the allegedly induced fraud through the general power of attorney, despite its temporal proximity to the misappropriations, could merge the various acts into a single criminal act.
The proper application of Article 48 of the Revised Penal Code concerning the plurality of crimes.
Whether the similarity in the mode of investigation (daily abstractions and bank deposits) should be interpreted as a single unified criminal intent or as separate criminal events.