Show red book, Napoles dared
Janet Napoles INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines—Produce the “red book.”
Levito Baligod, the former lawyer of whistle-blowers in the alleged P10-billion pork barrel racket, on Tuesday urged Janet Lim-Napoles to produce the record of her transactions covering the legislators’ Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).
Former employees of Napoles, led by Benhur Luy, have told the Inquirer that Napoles, the alleged mastermind of the PDAF scam, kept a “red book” where she herself wrote all her dealings, including payoffs, concerning siphoning off pork allocations to ghost projects and kickbacks.
Luy or any of the other whistle-blowers did not see the contents of the record book. Except that they saw it was color red.
Baligod, the first counsel for Luy and several other former Napoles employees who have turned against her, challenged the businesswoman to produce her records to support her claims in her 93-page affidavit submitted to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday.
“The key to know if she is telling the truth is for her to produce her red book where the whistle-blowers, including Benhur, had said was where Napoles recorded her personal transactions with lawmakers,” Baligod told the Inquirer in a telephone interview.
“The household help saw her write in her red book after a lawmaker or its authorized representative picked up the money in her house,” Baligod said, referring to his former clients. “It’s impossible that she based her affidavit on her transactions from her memory alone.”
Raji Mendoza, the new lawyer of Luy, did not want to comment on Napoles’ latest statement so as not to telegraph his moves. “As of the moment, I will keep our aces up our sleeves,” Mendoza said in a text message to the Inquirer.
In her expanded affidavit, Napoles implicated 20 senators and 100 congressmen in the PDAF schemes, saying that she put together the document on the basis of what “I could remember in my present condition at Ospital ng Makati,” as she was recuperating from an operation that removed her cancerous uterus.
Scapegoat?
The businesswoman said senators and congressmen and their assigned representatives picked up millions of pesos in cash from her house in the upscale Pacific Plaza Towers in Bonifacio Global City or in restaurants.
Napoles denied she masterminded the deals and declared that the pork barrel racket had been in place when she became involved in it and that she was now being made a “scapegoat” by those she had dealt with.
She has offered to turn state witness.
Names left out
Baligod also said Napoles omitted significant names in her list submitted to the DOJ. “Her affidavit was mostly truthful and partially false; she was selective.”
Napoles initially mentioned 11 senators, but she subsequently padded the list ostensibly after the Inquirer ran a series of articles based on the computer files of Luy contained in a hard disk drive. A copy of the disk was given to the Inquirer by Luy’s family during a visit to the Inquirer office in Makati City a year ago. The names of 25 former and current senators appear in the Luy files.
Napoles did not mention in her affidavit former Budget Secretary Rolando Andaya who, according to the Luy files, received at least P277 million in kickbacks from 2006 to 2009 for projects in the Department of Agrarian Reform.
She also did not mention Rene Maglanque, a former Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) assistant secretary and now Candaba mayor, who allegedly got P108 million in commissions.
She likewise did not mention Domingo Reyes, also a former DOTC official who acted as her agent.
Napoles also left out former Sen. Ramon Revilla Sr. and Senators Miriam Defensor-Santiago, JV Ejercito and Franklin Drilon whose names appear in Luy’s files.
Luy, speaking through Mendoza, said that no actual transaction took place with Drilon.
Blame all
Stephen Cascollan, a lawyer for another set of whistle-blowers led by Marina Sula, said of the affidavit: “Janet is still Janet. It is not a tell-all, but a blame all.”
Cascollan also said that the best test to show if Napoles was telling the truth would be to compare her statements with the testimonies of the government witnesses.
“She fails this test. The Filipino people deserve the whole truth, not just some of it,” he said.
Cascollan noted that Napoles in her affidavit said she was just a high school graduate and that she did not have “the skill to run such a complicated scheme.
Kevlar helmets case
He explained that before Napoles started her PDAF racket in 1999, Napoles along with her late mother Magdalena Lim, her trusted aide Evelyn de Leon and other military officials were charged with fraud in the Sandiganbayan by the military for the delivery of substandard Kevlar helmets.
Napoles was acquitted in 2010, but her late mother was convicted of the charges by the Sandiganbayan.
Cascollan said Napoles did not admit any wrongdoing. “She does not admit or corroborate any of the testimonies of the witnesses.” He said she didn’t even admit that she put up the nongovernment organizations (NGOs) as vehicles for her schemes.
He said that Napoles “cannot ask to spare her children, and then spare herself, too.”
Based on the affidavits of the witnesses, the Napoles children participated in the forging of beneficiaries of pork barrel-funded ghost projects. Jo-Christine Company, named after Napoles’ first daughter, was also recipient of hundreds of millions of PDAF funds coursed through the bogus NGOs.
Cascollan also criticized the government for giving Napoles undue importance. “The government has wasted so much time and resources discussing the ‘Napolist.’ What about the charges based on actual available and credible evidence that have not been filed?”
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