Napoles a repeat offender / Almendras wrong on funds

Lawmakers are anxious not so much if they’re in the latest list of pork-barrel plunderers than that they’ve already been found out. They know who they are, how they stole their multimillion-peso allocations. Alibis of their signatures being forged do not hold water. The budget department and a unit in Congress give them periodic reports on pork releases and balances. It’s not as if they’re too busy lawmaking to check how much state funds they have left to pocket. Even on the slim chance that aides misused their names, the lawmakers linked to the pork scam must resign. Be like the Koreans and Japanese who take responsibility for the foul-ups of subordinates.

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 Justice Sec. Leila de Lima still can’t justify her considering pork scam fixer Janet Lim Napoles as state witness. It’s senselesss, for Napoles is a repeat offender.

For 20-percent fee Napoles put up bogus anti-poverty NGOs and projects as conduits of the P10-billion pork of three senators and five congressmen in 2007-2009. The lawmakers took 50-percent cuts; the Executive implementing agency heads, 30 percent; for the project, zero.

Thence Napoles did it for 16 more senators and 188 congressmen (all yet to be identified by de Lima). Through sheer volume, she must have made more than most of her lawmaker-cohorts. All this surfaced when her ex-employees, who had acted as NGOs trustees, squealed.

 Napoles didn’t stop there. Using more fake NGOs and recipients, she looted as well the P900-million Malampaya Fund. Initially for energy works, the state’s oil drilling royalties were re-allotted in 2009 to disaster victims. Napoles quickly had a son and a daughter signing for penurious beneficiaries, of fake NGOs of a brother and nephew (who later blew the whistle). Heads of releasing agencies shared the loot.

From new reports it turns out that Napoles had started plundering since 2002-2004. In cahoots with nine past and present lawmakers, she filched P407 million from the barangay telephone project. At least two bureaucrats of the Dept. of Transportation and Communications were involved. Napoles’s eldest daughter was president of a company that made ghost deliveries of computers and modems.

Such a manic plunderer can hardly be the least guilty to qualify as state witness. Yet de Lima thinks otherwise. After listening for five hours to Napoles detail her modus operandi, the justice secretary has come to believe two things. One, that Napoles is key to proving the pork scam of the lawmakers and agency heads. Two, the truckloads of documentary evidence submitted to the Ombudsman is insufficient.

The lawyers of the ten whistleblowers are dismayed. Atty. Levito Baligod says the pork charges against the lawmakers will weaken instead of solidify if Napoles is removed as principal. That’s because the element of conspiracy, on which the case hinges, will collapse.

Three parties conspired, Baligod explains. The lawmakers offered the multibillion-peso pork to be stolen. The agency heads released the funds. Napoles’s NGOs and projects feigned as beneficiaries. No party could have functioned without the others.

Baligod says de Lima is theorizing to strengthen only the first pork plunder case against three senators and five congressmen. What of Napoles’s succeeding plunder with dozens more lawmakers, and with Malampaya and DOTC fund releasers?

De Lima should beware of Napoles’s words, adds Atty. Stephen Cascolan. Napoles allegedly had lied at the Senate, claiming she knew nothing of the incriminating papers turned over by her ex-staff. At best she invoked her right against self-incrimination. If Napoles later at a hospital bed told de Lima everything, it was due to realization that she would be imprisoned with her family for life, or be assassinated by a co-accused. That’s good enough motivation to tell the whole truth, without making her state witness. Transferring her from VIP quarters to a regular jail while on trial would keep reminding her of the need to stick to the truth. De Lima’s only other duty is to make her return her loot.

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 The cavalier attitude of Secretary to the Cabinet Rene Almendras towards official funds cannot be left alone. He refuses to divulge how much indemnity he paid to the 2010 Luneta hostages from Hong Kong. That’s because it supposedly came from private donors.

He talks like Joseph Estrada, refusing to say how much he spent refurbishing the presidential yacht in 1998 since friends had bankrolled it.

Precisely because it came from private donors, all the more Almendras publicly must account for it, for two reasons. One, he is duty-bound to do so. Two, he wouldn’t want to be suspected of using his closeness to the President (he and Noynoy Aquino were college chums) for hanky-panky.

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