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Sunday, February 19, 2012

Denying the truth

By Ninez Cacho-Olivares

Defense lawyers of the chief magistrate, Renato Corona, at Sunday’s press conference blasted Malacañang for its blatant interference in the Senate impeachment trial with charges that Noynoy’s Executive Secretary, Paquito Ochoa, acting in behalf of Noynoy, has been calling up senator-judges in a bid to influence them and offered a cool P100 million to each senator-judge for them to defy the temporary restraining order (TRO) on the dollar account of the Chief Justice.

Predictably, Malacañang aides denied the charge of the P100-million bribe that will be taken from the budget savings, which are considerable, as it is well known that the government underspent last year’s budget, claiming that this was yet another “fabrication” concocted by the defense team, stressing that this was such an insult to the senators.

The way the Palace aides talk, it is as if they and their boss Noynoy, are above such practices do not engage in such bribery on the legislature members.

Yet it is not a secret that Noynoy did resort to bribing senators and congressmen a few months back for them to pass the bill on the postponement of the elections in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) giving the President the power to appoint the ARMM officials. The bribe of additional pork barrel was two-fold for the House: A yes vote for the House to impeach then sitting Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez and a yes vote for the passage of the ARMM law.

For the senators, there was also the bribe of the additional pork barrel, which was virtually confirmed by Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who said — and this is on record — that there was a P30 million or so, taken from the road tax funds given to the senators.

Lacson was even quoted as having said that he can now give his constituents in Cavite better roads.

Today, he says that he is one senator “who has consistently refused his P200-million pork barrel allocation year after year,” and that he “categorically declare(s) that which the defense team said about the P100-million offer to the senator-judges is pure rubbish and nothing more.”

Rubbish, when he had earlier virtually admitted that senators were given P30 million more from the road tax at time of the Senate vote for the ARMM?

Rubbish, when it is much too clear that congressmen were offered the early release of their P70-million pork barrel or its withholding, in exchange for the 188 congressmen coming up with an impeachment complaint against the Chief Justice?

Lacson says it is contemptuous of the defense lawyers to preempt the senators in their caucus that will be taking up the matter of the TRO vote, yet he does not find it contemptuous of the President of the Republic publicly calling on the senators to defy the Supreme Court issued TRO, especially since Noynoy has been violating and “betraying the public trust,” engaging in graft and corrupt practices through his mode of bribing the members of Congress and being an unfit president, owing to the constitutional fact of the principle of separation of powers among the three branches of government and that he has no business interfering in the legislature and the judiciary.

All these are apart from the fact that Noynoy has been blatantly been violating his oath of office, as he has sworn to uphold, defend, obey and protect the Constitution, which he has not been doing, as he has gone to the extent of getting the senators, and the people to defy orders from the high court.

He has done all these publicly, and yet his allies now say that the defense’s exposé is rubbish and say nothing of the contemptible statements of Noynoy?

If so, there certainly is more truth to the “rubbish” of the defense’s exposé than that of Palace’s garbage of a denials.

Noynoy’s past record of buying congressional votes and his public interference in matters that do not belong to his domain, all attest to the truth of the defense panel’s exposé.

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