Plunder

The plunder and money laundering cases against the wife and three sons of retired Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia were not included in the former military general’s guilty plea for direct bribery and facilitating money laundering.

Thus ruled the Sandiganbayan, which sentenced Garcia to 14 years in prison, with additional years if he could not return the P407.8 million he stole from the government.

Garcia, who started serving his sentence in 2011, is due for release in 2025, since the anti-graft court granted his plea that an additional prison term be dropped in case of insolvency.

In other words, if Garcia’s wife Clarita and sons Ian Carl, Juan Paulo and Timothy Mark, who are all at large, were arrested tomorrow and convicted of plunder and money laundering by the Sandiganbayan, they would be in prison for the rest of their lives.

Readers, don’t you find it anomalous that Carlos Garcia, who stole money from the government, would be set free in three years, while his wife and three sons would be in jail for life?

Clarita and sons Ian Carl, Juan Paulo and Timothy Mark never stole the money, but were accidental beneficiaries of the loot on account of their relationships to the former general.

Garcia’s massive theft was discovered after his two sons were detained at the San Francisco International Airport for failing to declare $100,000 in cash in their possession.

Subsequent investigations led to Garcia being kicked out as comptroller of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and its chief of plans and programs.

Garcia’s wife and three sons are believed to be in another country, possibly in the United States.

Unless they do a Wally Sombero, they will remain out of reach of the country’s courts.

Wally Sombero, along with dismissed immigration commissioners Al Argosino and Mike Robles, is serving a life sentence for plunder in connection with a much-publicized P50-million bribery case that happened in 2016.

Sombero was in the US when he decided to come back to face a Senate inquiry.

The Senate summoned Sombero to shed light on the bribery scandal, wherein he was the bearer of the bribe money.

The P50-million bribe money was in exchange for the release of some 1,300 Mainland Chinese arrested by immigration agents for working illegally at an unlicensed online gaming business owned by Jack Lam inside the Clark Economic Zone.

Lam asked Sombero, a trouble-shooter for his wealthy friends whom he had known when he was in the service, to become his messenger.

A retired police colonel, Sombero purposely handed the bribe money at the lobby of a five-star hotel so the act would be recorded by the hotel’s closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras.

The recipients of the bribe money were then deputy immigration commissioners Argosino and Robles.

On his surrender to the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), Sombero implicated Argosino and Robles in the bribery scam.

Upon his request, I turned Sombero over to the NBI. He said he didn’t want to be arrested by agents of the Philippine National Police (PNP), to which he once belonged.

Sombero was released by the NBI as there were no cases filed against him, Argosino and Robles at that point.

A former recipient of the Dangal ng Bayan, the highest award the Civil Service Commission could bestow on a civilian official or employee, Sombero went to the US for a vacation.

Allow me to digress for a while: Sombero and I are friends, with our friendship dating back to the 1990s, when he was an officer of the PNP’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG).

Sombero was assigned to investigate complaints from aggrieved citizens who ran to the Isumbong mo kay Tulfo program (which is now defunct) for redress.

I once featured Sombero in my column in a previous broadsheet for turning down a P1-million bribe offer from a crime suspect that he arrested.

Sombero credited this columnist for his Dangal ng Bayan award.

Now, back to the story at hand.

Perhaps things would have turned out differently for Sombero had he decided to stay in the US while things were “hot” for him in this country. Many of his friends advised Wally to “let things cool down” before returning.

But Sombero answered the Senate summons to appear before the Blue Ribbon committee as a resource person.

And the rest is history.

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I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t pretend to know the law, but why was Sombero charged with and convicted of plunder when he was not a recipient of the P50-million bribe?

He only acted as a messenger for Lam. He was not complicit with the two immigration officials in extorting the P50 million from the illegal online gambling operator.

I stand corrected if I’m wrong: the most that Wally Sombero could have been charged with and convicted for was bribery, a much lesser offense.

I understand that in law, both the giver and the taker of a bribe are criminally liable.

If that is so, then why was Lam not charged with bribery as well? Lam is out of jail.

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Joke! Joke! Joke!

Chinese restaurant owner: Why do we always run out of toothpicks on our tables?

Headwaiter: I don’t know, sir. Whenever I use a toothpick, I return it.