Feuding senators get personal

MANILA, Philippines - The debates regarding the use of Senate funds by Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile have degenerated from a verbal joust over legal issues to a vicious personal brawl.

In a privileged speech, Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano lashed out at Enrile yesterday for statements made against him, his sister Sen. Pia Cayetano and fellow member of the Senate minority, Antonio Trillanes IV, over the Senate president’s selective distribution of funds.

What started out as a narration of the events leading to the controversy turned into an airing of dirty laundry in public.

Cayetano started the ball rolling with continuous references to Enrile’s chief of staff, Jessica “Gigi” Reyes, who, he implied, was running the Senate alongside the Senate President.

Cayetano also showed a supposed memorandum from the office of the Senate President issued last Dec. 5 and accompanied by a disbursement voucher, authorizing the release of additional maintenance operating and other expenses (MOOE) of P1.3 million to all senators.

A second memorandum and disbursement voucher dated last Dec. 10 was also presented by Cayetano, which supposedly contained the authorization from the office of the Senate President for the release of additional MOOE in the sum of P318,000 to all senators.

What became the subject of all the controversy was contained in a third memorandum, in the form of a letter from Reyes to Senate Budget Officer Rene Chua, dated Dec. 5, 2012, authorizing the release of additional MOOE to selected senators, as instructed by Enrile.

It was Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago who first cried out about the apparent deliberate omission made by Enrile on the release of P1.6 million.

Santiago, Trillanes, and the Cayetanos received only P250,000 each in cash gift.

At one point during Cayetano’s privilege speech, he directly addressed Reyes for calling the senators hypocrite.

Cayetano said this was the first time that he heard of a chief of staff of a senator calling some senators hypocrites.

Enrile, as expected, did not take all the attacks against him sitting down. He interpellated Cayetano starting off with an immediate reference to the younger senator’s deceased father, former senator Rene Cayetano.

He brought out a document supposedly containing details of the P37 million in debt owed to his law office by the late senator, which he said has not been paid.

Enrile earlier hinted he has more “smoking gun” against some of his colleagues who have been questioning his decision to give P1.6 million in additional MOOE last month to 18 senators.

“Wait until I expose all the expenses of other people here,” Enrile said as he went into the podium to start the session Wednesday afternoon.

Enrile also challenged his critics to bring any charges against him to any court.

“I am waiting for them to file all the cases they want and to have me investigated by any court, by any forum. I am just waiting, waiting, waiting,” Enrile said.

Getting personal

Cayetano denounced the statements made by Enrile against his late father who, he said, could no longer defend himself.

He went on to claim that when his father decided to run for senator, Enrile kicked him out of the law office that he helped establish.

“He (the elder Cayetano) practically gave his life to you. It was during the term of President Corazon Aquino that you were incarcerated but he was there to support you. When you became prosperous, my father was left to tend to the law office and he made it prosperous,” Cayetano told Enrile.

“I don’t remember that he owes you 37 million because he works… my father worked for every single centavo. It’s unfair for you to bring it up,” he added.

Cayetano told Enrile that he has a debt of gratitude to his family, which they never asked to be paid.

Cayetano went on to enumerate numerous incidents where Enrile owed a debt of gratitude to the family.

“You already did Mr. (Senate) President, you already went to the gutter; your chief-of-staff had already gone to the gutter. This is irrelevant to our discussion here. You are bringing up things where a person who’s already dead cannot answer,” Cayetano said.

Apology

After a heated debate on the floor that turned too personal, Enrile then apologized before his colleagues.

“I apologize for the fracas that happened, it was not intended. I was just trying to answer certain personal assaults against my person but I will not deal with those matters anymore,” Enrile said.

Enrile made the apology after the Senate session was suspended for about an hour when cooler heads intervened.

“Let it stay on the record, and let the Divine Spirit determine whose truth is correct, where lies the truth,” Enrile said.

“I have served the country for almost 50 years. I’ve been subjected to all kinds of investigations, and in fact, I am imprisoned twice by two presidents but I will leave it aside. I was simply taken by the hard assault on my person,” he added.

Senate President Pro-Tempore Jinggoy Estrada said Enrile’s blood pressure shot up to 180/100, prompting Senate doctors to advise him to take full rest.

Enrile, however, refused even as he wore an oxygen mask while resting at the Senate’s executive lounge with the Senate emergency van on standby.

Upon his return to the session hall, Enrile answered Cayetano’s questions on the disbursement of funds as well as his distribution of additional MOOE last Christmas.

“It was only now that it happened because I made a mistake of differentiating the majority and the minority…. If not, there would have been no hullabaloo,” Enrile said.

Enrile pointed out that the uneven distribution of some funds to senators belonging to majority and minority groups could be traced to the 1940s when minority senators did not even get anything out of the Senate budget.

He explained that he intentionally sent out checks from the official Land Bank account of the Senate so that they can easily be audited by the Commission on Audit (COA).

Enrile revealed the Senate budget for 2012 was pegged at P2.853-billion, divided into personnel services, MOOE, capital outlay, secretariat, oversight committees among others.

Not discretionary fund

COA, on the other hand, revealed Santiago had received about P15 million in MOOE in several months in 2012.

COA chair Ma. Gracia Pulido-Tan made the revelation in the process of explaining to Santiago the authority of the Senate President in augmenting appropriations under the General Appropriations Act (GAA) of 2012.

Responding to a letter by Santiago who called last week for audit on how savings are used by Congress, Tan said Santiago herself received a total of 15,492,292 in “additional MOOE” last year.

The amounts were distributed in March, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December, the COA said.

In a letter dated Jan. 21 this year, Tan explained Enrile, as Senate President, is empowered under Section 53 of the General Appropriations Act of 2012 to augment any item in the GAA from savings in other items of their appropriations.

The President, Speaker, Chief Justice and heads of the Constitutional Commissions, as well as the Ombudsman also enjoy the same fiscal autonomy. –Rhodina Villanueva