"x x x.
Ruling of the Court
Dimaano attempts to make a distinction between money ordered “collected” from the judgment debtor and paid to the judgment creditor and money ordered “returned” by one party to another from whom such money was unlawfully taken. Dimaano claims that she was already a victim when the government illegally seized her money. It would be unfair that she should still pay the government some fee to get her money back.
But, first, the imposition of the sheriff’s fee is not a penalty for some wrong that Dimaano had done. It is an assessment for the cost of the sheriff’s service in collecting the judgment amount for her benefit. Its collection is authorized under Rule 141 of the Rules of Court, as amended,[13] thus:
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SEC. 3. Persons authorized to collect legal fees. – Except as otherwise provided in this rule, the officers and persons hereinafter mentioned, together with their assistants and deputies, may demand, receive, and take the several fees hereinafter mentioned x x x.
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SEC. 10. Sheriffs, PROCESS SERVERS and other persons serving processes. – x x x (l) For money collected by him x x x by order, execution, attachment, or any other process, judicial or extrajudicial which shall immediately be turned over to the Clerk of Court, x x x.
Second, the order to pay a party the money owed him and the order to pay another the money unlawfully taken from him are both awards of actual or compensatory damages. They compensate for the pecuniary loss that the party suffered and proved in court.[14] The recipients of the award, whether for money owed or taken from him, benefit from the court’s intervention and service in collecting the amount. As the Sandiganbayan correctly said, what determines the assessment of the disputed court fee is the fact that the court, through valid processes, ordered a certain sum of money to be placed in the hands of the sheriff for turnover to the winning party.
In addition to raising before the Court the matter of the sheriff’s fee, Dimaano also questions the Sandiganbayan’s failure to award interest on the amount that was to be returned to her considering that the government used and invested the money as if it were its own. But, as the Republic points out, Dimaano could no longer seek the award of interest since she filed no appeal from the decision of the Sandiganbayan that ordered merely the return of such amount with no mention of interest.[15]
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