Who’s this Jose Velarde?

The Senate received yesterday a letter from a man claiming to be the "real Jose Velarde" who owns the controversial Equitable-PCI Bank accounts containing some P1.2 billion earlier linked to President Estrada.

Senate President Aquilino Pimentel said the letter, sent from Laurel Springs, New Jersey in the United States, contained a signature similar to the one found in bank documents presented to the impeachment court last Friday.

Pimentel said he has informed the prosecution and defense panels in the stalled impeachment trial of the letter’s arrival but did not tell them other details.

"I told both the defense and the prosecution about the letter so there will be no surprises," he said.

Pimentel said that to prove his identity, the man claiming to be the real Velarde attached copies of his ID cards containing his signature. The signature bore resemblance to the ones in the Equitable-PCI Bank papers with only one difference.

"He signed ‘Velarde’ with just a ‘V’," Pimentel said.

The letter is now being kept at the Senate vault and Pimentel said copies of it will be distributed to senators and the media when the trial resumes on Jan. 2.

However, a highly placed source privy to the impeachment trial said the man who sent the letter could be a businessman-friend of the President from New Jersey who even coordinated his "Jeep ni Erap" campaign in 1998.

The source noted that the man was a native of Angeles City in Pampanga, an Iglesia ni Cristo member and was even present in the President’s inauguration rites in Malolos, Bulacan on June 30, 1998.

Members of the prosecution panel, meanwhile, aired suspicion that the man who wrote the letter to claim the Velarde accounts may have been "recruited" by Philippine National Police chief Director General Panfilo Lacson in his recent trip to the US.

Malacañang quickly dismissed such suspicion, though, saying "the prosecution’s imagination may now be going too far."

"There are so many of these fictitious stories now going around," said acting Press Secretary Mike Toledo. "Whoever are the authors of these stories should really put them in a novel someday. But please, do not believe them because they are totally not true."

The President is being tried for impeachment on grounds that he received millions of pesos from the proceeds of the illegal numbers game jueteng.

The trial took a break last week after one bank executive testified that she witnessed Mr. Estrada sign the fictitious name Jose Velarde in documents for the Equitable-PCI Bank accounts.

Clarissa Ocampo, a senior vice president and trust officer of Equitable-PCI Bank, told the impeachment tribunal that she and another bank official watched last Feb. 4 as the President signed at Malacañang a P500-million loan to the company of William Gatchalian, one of his businessmen-friends, using the Velarde name

Newly appointed presidential spokesman Ernesto Maceda, however, categorically denied that the President owns the controversial bank accounts.

"Her (Ocampo’s testimony) is good only for making headlines," Maceda said. "It is legally worthless."

Makati Rep. Joker Arroyo, the prosecutor who convinced the impeachment court to hear Ocampo’s testimony last Friday, said no one can claim to be the real Velarde any more since doing so would mean that the President has allowed himself to be "used" by his friends.

"What? Now you have a President who is a dummy. That’s even worse," he said.

‘Don’t insult us’

In other developments, an opposition leader urged the President’s lawyers to "stop insulting the Filipino people" in their attempt to disprove Ocampo’s testimony.

Former Bulacan Gov. Roberto Pagdanganan said Filipinos are now getting embarrassed because of the insistence of Mr. Estrada’s lawyers that the controversial bank accounts have no bearing in the ongoing trial.

"That’s falsification of documents. That’s a violation of the law," he said. "The President’s lawyers should stop insulting us. The people know that they are just a big factory of lies."

Bukidnon Rep. Juan Miguel Zubiri, who is also from the opposition, said there is no way the President’s lawyers or even Maceda, the President’s spokesman for the impeachment trial, could destroy Ocampo’s testimony.

He specifically cited Maceda as not at all credible to disprove Ocampo’s claims since at the time the bank documents were signed he was in the US working as an ambassador.

"The witness, based on her testimony, was just a foot away from the President when he signed the bank papers while Maceda was in a land 10,000 miles away," he said.

Batangas Rep. Ralph Recto, an estranged ally of the President, pointed out that even a "slick" spokesman will be no match to a witness who is telling the truth.

"In the end the unvarnished truth will always come out and will be discerned by the public," he said. – With Marichu Villanueva, Eva de Leon