Prosecutors' media blitz boomeranged on them

The jeering hurts, Ombudsman special prosecutors cry. For they’re being accused of lawyering for the very defendant they’re expected to hound to life sentence for plunder.

Yet what other impression can they give the public, if not that? For five days last week they media-blitzed to justify their plea bargain with former Armed Forces comptroller Carlos Garcia. Point by point they demolished their own evidence of his stealing P303 million. In so doing, they justified his hasty bail on lesser crimes, his accomplice-family’s exoneration, and his promise to surrender less than half of the loot (P135 million).

That’s why ex-Ombudsman Simeon Marcelo shook his head at his former subordinates. “The outcome will be zero-sum,” he rued. “They practically fed their indictee all arguments. The Sandiganbayan formally will allow the plea deal and drop the no-bail plunder rap against Garcia, wife Clarita, and sons. On the slim chance that the court revokes the deal, Garcia can use their public statements to win acquittal. Any which way, the people lose.”

Actually, the special prosecutors’ claims about the plea deal were flimsy. Lawyers and laymen were left doubting their motives, though convinced that they should be made to answer.

First, they blamed Marcelo and ex-chief prosecutor Dennis Villa-Ignacio for leaving them hanging. Allegedly the two had promised to bring, as witnesses, military contractors who paid Garcia bribes. Villa-Ignacio denied making such pledge, recalling to radio-TV interviewers events in 2005 when they filed charges against the general. They were busy then with Joseph Estrada’s plunder trial, attending hearings in the morning and interviewing new witnesses till evening. Could the media-blitzing prosecutors have caught the broadcast interviews? The next day one of them said in a press briefing that they had argued the Garcia case mornings, then scouted for witnesses evenings, but couldn’t find any. The question left hanging was not who’s aping who? It’s who’s to blame, superiors who didn’t spoon-feed or subordinates who were waiting to be spoon-fed?

The prosecutors claimed that Marcelo and Villa-Ignacio had collected only spotty witnesses and documents. Supposedly this fatally weakened their case; they had no choice but to accept Garcia’s plea offer. That’s odd. The Sandiganbayan 2nd division had voted 2-1, and a special division 3-2, declaring the prosecution evidence strong enough to merit continuation of trial. That was in Jan. 2010, when the court denied Garcia’s plea for bail. In Mar. 2010 the prosecutors signed with Garcia the plea deal. They now say a 3-2 ruling is weak because reversible anytime one justice switches sides. It shows that the prosecutors acted not based on reality but future possibility.

They added that Marcelo and Villa-Ignacio’s documentary proof was shaky. Clarita’s typewritten and handwritten statements, detailing their plunder to US feds, allegedly were not acceptable in court. False. When the 2nd and special divisions deemed the prosecution evidence strong, they also upheld the admissibility of Clarita’s statements. These were not privileged information of one spouse to another, but her own voluntary recollection of events in which she was herself a participant.

One prosecutor hair-splittingly claimed that they never kept the plea deal secret, just that they were not compelled to make it public. Papers in my possession belie him. I formally wrote the Ombudsman in Sept. 2010 for a copy; it denied my request, on supposed sub-judice rules. Beat reporters found out about and dutifully told of the deal when it was made in open court only on Dec. 16, 2010. Garcia and the prosecutors’ joint filing in Mar. 2010, and the 2nd division’s conditional approval in May 2010, were kept under wraps.

The prosecutors were so voluble they were bound to slip. And they did — on their claim that the P303 million was bloated (again by their hated Marcelo and Villa-Ignacio) and so the hapless Garcia can return only P135 million unexplained wealth actually in his possession. It turned out, from their own tirade, that Garcia had withdrawn and hidden P128 million cash in late 2004. This was when the Anti-Money Laundering Council was still seeking court permission to freeze his ill-gotten assets. The P128 million, because allegedly no longer in his hands, is not part of the P135 million to be surrendered.

The prosecutors claimed that it was Garcia who offered to plead guilty to bribery and facilitating money laundering. He allegedly gave up his defense not so much due to the Sandigan rulings on his bail plea, but because of potential extradition of Clarita and their three sons from America to face the plunder raps. “We told him that his family will be jailed in Manila,” one prosecutor bragged about “convincing” Garcia to surrender the P135 million. If he was so good in scaring the hell out of indictees, that prosecutor might wish to explain why he didn’t insist on the general returning the P135 million plus the P128 million, and face the rest of his life in prison, in exchange for exculpating his family. After all, the general was willing to admit in writing, as he did last Dec. 16, that he alone was the thief.

For all the media-blitz, the prosecutors were never able to answer the question in most people’s mind. That is, if Garcia knew that the prosecution case was weak, why did he have to plea-bargain and return P135 million, when he could have wangled an acquittal to keep the loot? There’s a simpler question: why did the prosecutors never consult the Armed Forces, the offended party in Garcia’s plunder?

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