The real story

The media can sometimes get careless in reporting stories. In the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona at the Senate, sloppy reporting not only gets the story all wrong, it misses out on the real story itself.

Consider the stories that emerged from Monday’s testimony of PSBank president Pascual Garcia III at the Senate. Virtually all stories said the bank accounts of Corona with the bank were audited in pursuance to anti-money laundering regulations.

Because the stories were wrong, they erroneously implied that the accounts of Corona with PSBank raised money laundering red flags all over the place such that an anti-money laundering team had to swoop down on the bank to audit the accounts.

But I challenge everyone to go back to the records of the trial and see for themselves what Garcia actually said. What Garcia said was that never were the accounts of Corona delved into by the auditors. The auditors never looked into the details of the accounts, Garcia said.

What the bank president said the auditors did was merely to check on a random sampling of signature cards which happened to include those of Corona. The check on signature cards was meant to find out if the bank complied with the so-called PEP requirement of money-laundering rules.

PEP stands for politically-exposed person. As chief justice, Corona is one such person. The audit sought to make sure that the signature cards of politically-exposed persons like Corona bear the marking PEP. 

That was what Garcia said in his testimony and this can be verified from the records. But what virtually all reports said the following day was that the bank accounts of Corona were the subject of an anti-money laundering audit.

The stories were not only grossly wrong, they were grossly injurious to the person of Corona. But then, nobody cares anymore about the rights of Corona. If President Aquino himself is leading the charge to convict Corona outside the impeachment process, what can anyone do?

But the sloppy reporting did not just end with erroneous stories that seriously injured a person’s reputation beyond what that person deserves. It also missed out on what should have been the real story to be derived from Garcia’s testimony.

Garcia said the audit happened about a year before the impeachment case against Corona was filed. The significance of this disclosure is that a year before impeachment, the Aquino government was already fishing for information against Corona. That should have been the story.

According to Garcia, PSBank was not singled out for the audit. Such audits are regularly conducted on banks. It can thus be inferred that, if government really wants to, such audits can prove very useful in pinpointing where the “enemies of the state” keep their money.

Even without looking into the details, the signature cards alone already tag the banks where such enemies of the state have accounts. Getting the details of what those accounts contain can come later, in what can be an entirely different cloak-and-dagger operation.

Enter the “small ladies” and “tall congressmen” and envelopes of documents changing hands just mysteriously out of CCTV camera range or surreptitiously tucked into iron grills in the dead of night.

From Day One Corona was a marked man by the Aquino government. Right at his inauguration, Aquino had no qualms breaking tradition if it meant the pleasure of publicly showing his disdain for Corona by taking his oath before a subordinate justice.

Tragically, it is not just tradition Aquino is willing to break. In word and deed when dealing with political enemies, Aquino has shown a remarkable callousness in denying anyone due process, in tandem with employing dirty tricks. No search for truth has been more compromised.