Senators’ emerging alibi for pork scam: Dumbness

Transportation Sec. Joseph Augustus Emilio Aguinaldo Abaya has just returned from the APEC Transport Ministers’ Meeting in Tokyo. So impressed he must be with what he saw there. His homecoming press statement was about the need for subway systems in megalopolises like Tokyo and Manila.

Mega-Manileños weren’t as enthusiastic. At once they twitted Abaya: if his department cannot run well the ground level and elevated Light Rail and Metro Rail Transits (LRT-MRT), what more one underground? Others hooted louder: if the 15-meter-long Lagusnilad road underpass floods over from the rains, what more a deeper subway?

The LRT-MRT are both in the red. The trains and coaches are so rundown they often conk out during rush hours. The Czech ambassador has accused the MRT brass of trying to extort $30 million from Czech firm Inekon to be allowed to bid for the repair-maintenance contract.

Other agencies under Abaya’s department are as steeped in controversy. The Manila airport teems with thieves and cheating cabbies. The aviation authority can’t get the country out of the US blacklist. The Coast Guard frequently extorts money from trespassing foreign trawlers. Maritime officers allow unfit passenger ships to sail. Seaports are a mess. The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board is too slow to issue permits for new utility vehicles.

The Land Transportation Office is of special note. For two years it badmouthed as inept its private servicer for driver’s license and vehicle registration database, but then renewed its multibillion-peso contract. It has run out of vehicle license plates. In a flawed bidding, it awarded as new plate maker a company blacklisted by the government for forgery. The Dutch financial partner lacked capital for the two-decade-long work. The LTO chief was videoed while illicitly playing the slot machine at the casino. Abaya is taking so long to investigate the misdeed, which should be easy just by checking the many scasino security CCTV tapes; whereas, the official’s church already has expelled her for disciplinary breach.

Perhaps Abaya is being distracted by other concerns. Could it be pressing family duties? Just asking, considering that the ten-member delegation led by Abaya to Tokyo included five relatives. Traveling officially aside from him were: Atty. Michael Angelo A. Abaya, Plaridel Madarang Abaya, Ma. Consuelo Aguinaldo Abaya, Paul Plaridel Aguinaldo Abaya Jr., and Emilio Maximo Jose Aguinaldo Pulido.

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As pieced together from whistleblowers and documents, the modus operandi in the pork-barrel scam is evident. Greedy lawmakers masterminded with trusted aides the pocketing of their “pork” lump sums. Facilitating the crime with the senators and congressmen’s staff were fixers like Janet Lim Napoles. Accomplices were bureaucrats in the budget department and implementing agencies, who released the public funds to Napoles’ bogus NGOs and projects. The hundred-million-peso kickbacks were then turned over to the masterminds.

Series and combinations of crimes conspiratorially were employed: malversation, bribery, forgery, falsification, money laundering, tax evasion, asset concealment. The amounts, exceeding P50 million each in Napoles’ scheme with three senators and two congressmen) qualifies as non-bailable plunder. The accused face jailing while on years-long trial.

The flight of the lawmakers’ chiefs of staff betrays the alibi they will invoke. The talkative among them in fact have told the press. Supposedly, they innocently authorized their top aides to work on legit “pork” releases. Purportedly, little did they know that those aides — now safely hiding abroad from interrogation — dealt with the fixer Napoles. Allegedly, lower staff members disobeyed orders to check the realness of NGOs and projects. “It’s not our job to verify those,” one senator lamely claimed. They’ve never met Napoles or her whistleblowing gofers; those photos with her in socials were but on request of common hangers-on.

In short, the accused plead, their trustees had fooled them. They were dumb, but not devious.

How such alibi will wash in court is predictable. The ongoing Senate inquiry hints at the trial magistrates’ reaction. As inquiry head Sen. Teofisto Guingona III remarked, “You’re a senator, yet you didn’t see it coming?” Impliedly, a high official of the land who merits the official vehicle plate number “7” is not one believably to be duped just like that by close subordinates. In one senator’s case, it would be interesting to watch him squirm out of certain exposure of his King Saul-like dalliance with his top aide.

Dumbness is not excusable. It is a crime. Lawmakers who handed “pork” to fake NGOs and projects are liable for malversation — by abandonment or negligence. Under the Penal Code, if the amount exceeds P22,000, the accused cannot post bail and faces life sentence, like in plunder. So three other congressmen implicated with Napoles’ gang in the millions of pesos also will land early behind bars.

Freezing the accused lawmakers’ assets, to prevent dissipation and preparatory to confiscation, can complete the exaction of justice. If fixer Napoles’ bank deposits and real estate holdings have been held, then more so the masterminds.’

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