Drilon: Ombudsman covering up past misdeeds

MANILA, Philippines - Sen. Franklin Drilon lamented yesterday that Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez and Special Prosecutor Wendell Sulit lacked

delicadeza

for ignoring calls to resign from their posts following their negligence on the cases involving former military comptrollers retired generals Jacinto Ligot and Carlos Garcia.

He assailed Gutierrez and Sulit for what he saw as a “consistent pattern of covering up” the transactions that may have expanded the filing of graft charges against the two former comptrollers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).

Drilon, chairman of the Senate committee on finance, reiterated his call for Gutierrez and Sulit to resign even if the two officials have maintained that they did their jobs based on evidence presented before them regarding the two cases.  

A week ago, Drilon said the special prosecutors should be charged for graft.

“(It would seem) delicadeza is no longer in their vocabulary. (So our calls to them may have been wasted)… Yes, they should (resign) kung meron silang delicadeza (or) they should already go on leave given what we have seen,” Drilon said.

He said that the calls for resignation have fallen on deaf ears since the Ombudsman and the special prosecutors have insisted in the past Senate hearings that they have been doing their job in getting Garcia to agree with the plea bargain and in pursuing the forfeiture case against Ligot.

Ligot, comptroller during the time of the late Defense secretary Angelo Reyes, had amassed about P740 million in dollar and peso deposits but he only has a forfeiture case pending before the Sandiganbayan.

Ligot’s successor, Garcia, was able to strike a plea bargaining agreement with special government prosecutors on a plunder charge that was reduced to direct bribery, which paved the way for him to be freed on bail.

Garcia served as AFP comptroller for about four years during the terms of former AFP chiefs Diomedio Villanueva, Roy Cimatu and Efren Abu, who were appointed to the top military post courtesy of the revolving door policy of former President and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

‘Conspiracy’

Drilon said the denials of Sulit in last Friday’s hearing that they received the report from the Anti-Money Laundering Council about Ligot’s huge bank accounts already reveal a conspiracy to cover up their misdeeds, a seeming pattern that emerged in the Senate hearing last Friday.

In Garcia’s case, the Ombudsman and special prosecutors opted to strike a plea bargain agreement, which allowed Garcia to merely return about half of the P300 million in accounts and some properties to the government rather than recover all his alleged ill-gotten wealth in the plunder case.

In that aspect alone he said there was a concerted cover-up plan, although it was unknown who hatched it. But what’s clear is that “there is a consistent pattern of covering up all these misdeeds,” Drilon said over dzBB radio.

Citing bank records, Drilon revealed the huge bank accounts of Ligot, which were left out in the forfeiture case filed against him before the Sandiganbayan.

The filing of a graft case or plunder was needed before a money-laundering case can be filed against a person, Drilon noted.

Drilon also expressed his disappointment against bank institutions which allowed the questionable movements of cash in Ligot’s bank accounts, as well as those reportedly under the names of a brother-in-law and some relatives.

‘Batman and Robin’

But Senate President Pro-Tempore Jinggoy Estrada believes that former Ombudsman Simeon Marcelo and former government prosecutor Dennis Villa-Ignacio should be blamed for the fiasco in the Garcia case.

Rather than blame Gutierrez, Estrada said the “Batman and Robin” tandem of Marcelo and Villa-Ignacio should be held liable for not building up a strong case against Garcia.

“They should be blamed because they did not file a strong case. If you read the records they failed to provide enough evidence to pin down Garcia,” said Estrada, who also flatly rejected an insinuation that his statement could have stemmed from the two officials’ role in the filing of plunder case against him and former President Joseph Estrada.

“This has nothing to do with it. Just read the court records and you will see,” Estrada reiterated.

It turned out that it was Villa-Ignacio who wrote President Aquino a few weeks ago questioning the plea bargaining agreement with Garcia.

At the Senate hearing, Sulit revealed that Villa-Ignacio misled the President when he claimed that Garcia filed a demurrer to evidence to his plunder case, which was rejected by the Sandiganbayan.  No such motion was filed.

Sulit made the revelation after she was confronted by Blue Ribbon chairman Sen. Teofisto Guingona III on why the Office of the Ombudsman and the Office of the Special Prosecutor had asked the Sandiganbayan to cite Marcelo and Villa-Ignacio in contempt for deceiving Aquino and the public as to the truth on the case of General Garcia.