No smoking gun after all, just a puff of smoke! - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

So many days and so much "suspense" were consumed by all that fuss over the so-called "Jose Valhalla" bank account. But when the sealed envelope was finally opened yesterday, there was no Valhalla, only "Joe Velarde" and not much else. The Prosecutors are now griping that the Equitable-PCIBank documents must have been "doctored." What about the stubborn objections put up by the Defense panel of the President? Just a moro-moro?

At the rate the impeachment trial is going, judging from the time-consuming huffing and puffing over the "Valhalla," now "Velarde" documents, the Senate will be meeting up to Christmas 2001, next year, before it resolves the current hearings with conviction or acquittal. And whaat? There were only P5,000 in the questioned bank account? The Prosecutors walked right into a trap?

There are still many unanswered questions, though, in the public mind. For one, why did Filipino-Chinese presidential crony Jaime Dichaves, who was introduced to the bank by a GLG (George Lim Go?), open a bank account under another name? Who actually signed that mammoth check for P142 million? Who is the real owner then of the controversial "Boracay" mansion? In this investigation, when you get the answer to a question it only provokes several other questions.

At least the name of Dichaves has been dredged into the light. He’s known as the Telecommunications Taipan. How did he get so big when nobody was looking? And what other "sidelines" does he have?
The fall-out in the Equitable-PCIBank is also earth-shaking. Go’s gone. Dick Romulo’s in, to dispel any suspicions the bank had anything to do with tainted jueteng funds or money laundering. Or the Muslim Youth Foundation.

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If the sagging Christmas sales in the United States are any indication, Americans must really believe their prosperous country is headed towards a recession. Poor George W. Bush. He’s taking over the helm of state on January 20, 2001, just as the US is on the brink of experiencing a downturn. The Nasdaq has all but collapsed. The DOW is going down. Blue-chip stocks are sliding. Economists and analysts are euphemistically saying that the economy will hopefully have "a soft landing." (Translation: the economy is falling, and we hope it won’t crash). You bet. "It’s the economy, stupid."

Perhaps there will be a last-minute tidal wave of desperate shopping before Christmas Eve, but already shops and department stores have drastically marked down their prices, something which traditionally happens AFTER Christmas, not BEFORE.

In a frontpage article entitled: "How Do You Sell Christmas Spirit?", the Asian Wall Street Journal last Tuesday quotes the US Commerce Department as saying that "nearly one-quarter, or $186 billion, of all consumer spending takes place in the months of November and December." As much as 50 percent of some advertising budgets in the US are earmarked for this two-month "season of giving."

My worry is: If the American economy is in trouble, can you imagine the impact that will have here? We keep on repeating the mantra that if only we got rid of Estrada, "investors" will come back. What happens when the so-called "foreign investors" are going bankrupt themselves – in their own countries? So, we’re hit with a double-whammy. The first is our own business and economic meltdown stemming from our political turmoil. Second is we’re losing business owing to the worsening global economic downturn. If anything, the former Power Houses of Western Europe are even worse off than the United States. The euro has proved a flop. There’s a trade war in the offing between the European Union and the USA, this time, sparked by the disaffection arising from the subsidized $10.7 billion sale of fifty Airbus A3XX airplanes which is, the Yanks claim, "prejudicing" Boeing.

As for all of us in the Third World (with the exception of the People’s Republic of China, with its coolie and slave labor and spit-in-your-eye foreign policy), we’re drowning – having been lured into the river by the Pied Piper tune of "globalization."

Can we say "Happy New Year"? Or should it be: "Beware the Ides of March"?

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An Associated Press dispatch from Berlin confirmed the other day what we said in this column: that former German Abu Sayyaf hostage Werner Wallert had written a book based on his so-called "ordeal" at the hands of the Moro bandits.

It’s no surprise to me that the book, which has finally come off the press, entitled, Horror in Tropical Paradise, is much more critical of the government and the army than it is of the Abu kidnappers.

In his column in Malaya, former Press Secretary (FVR-time) Jesus Sison wrote yesterday: "I have one word to describe former German hostage Werner Wallert: ingrate." Indeed, he’s worse than that: an opportunist.

The three members of the Wallert family, who were abducted along with 18 others from a Malaysian resort on Sipadan Island on April 23, 1999, have made a lucrative "cottage industry" out of their experience. When they were in captivity, "mom," i.e. Mrs. Renate Wallert, 56, a school teacher, put on a Famas-award type act portraying herself as literally dying of health complications. The photographs and TV shots of a prostrate Mrs. Wallert being carried through the jungle on an improvised stretcher by their Abu captors, or listlessly lying down in a forest clearing, went several times around the world. However, when she was released and brought out on July 17, she was strong enough to walk on her own and well-composed enough to ask Government Negotiator Robert Aventajado for "film" because she had to take pictures. When she got to Frankfurt and was whisked off to Göttingen by a Federal government helicopter, where she gave a pre-arranged exclusive interview to the influential German TV network, SAT-2, she was vigorous enough to launch herself on a tirade against the Philippine government and military.

When her husband, Werner Wallert, 57 (who teaches geography in Göttingen) got out weeks later, he began publishing his own "diary", obviously a calendar of events he had been writing during their "stay" with the Abu Sayyaf, plus well-taken color photographs in STERN (The Star), the big-circulation glossy weekly photo-news magazine. One photo showed their son, Marc Wallert, being taught to shoot an Armalite by a Moro rebel. In fact, Marc celebrated his 27th birthday in the Abu camp on July 8 just before his own release. In short, the three Wallerts seem to have spent their "vacation" with the Abus dreaming up juicy television and publication contracts. Their four- to five-month ordeal must have netted them millions of Deutschmarks in personal profit.

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I can only say that the Wallert "critical" book is what President Estrada and Secretary Aventajado deserve for having shilly-shallied for almost half a year on the Abu hostage crisis.

Instead of punching in immediately and crushing the Abu Sayyaf, while attempting to rescue their captives, the government drew out "negotiations" for months, piously bleating that it was official policy not to discuss ransom when everybody knew that ransoms were being paid.

By yielding to the importunings of Berlin, Paris and Helsinki "not to use force" in freeing the victims and resorting to open-ended and embarrassing negotiations, the government shamed our nation before the entire world. Our military was disgraced by being made to appear bungling and ineffective when, in truth, it was Malacañang that was holding it back. Ditto for the Philippine National Police, whose Director-General Panfilo Lacson fretted at the bit and fumed that his Special Action Forces (SAF) had been ready from the first week to make the attack.

In the end, when the Army was finally set loose to attack in September, combatting the now-well-heeled Abus had become ten times more difficult. The bandits had dug in, and recruited hundreds more Moro insurgents, all eager to share in the booty, and had restocked and re-armed. The half-year delay not only cost us considerable "face" but loss of soldiers’ lives. Worst of all, Der Spiegel, Germany’s topflight exposé newsmagazine (whose correspondent Andreas Lorenz had been one of the Abu captives), accused Estrada and Aventajado of having "allegedly" pocketed half of the $20 million ransom paid by the Malaysians, Germans and Libyans.

The moral of the story is: Don’t try to please anybody. Don’t dicker for ransom. Don’t let kidnappers get away; hit them immediately and hit them hard. The way so many of the ex-captives are bad-mouthing us in the world press, instead of being grateful they weren’t cut down in the crossfire, has provoked some military men into muttering: "We should have attacked the Abus immediately, and shot down both them and the hostages."

I hate to say that might have been neater. It’s unchristian at Christmastime to nurse such ideas.