No closure yet on NBN-ZTE controversy
By Gil C. Cabacungan Jr., Christian V. Esguerra, Leila Salaverria
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 03:34:00 07/16/2008
MANILA, Philippines—It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.
A day after the Supreme Court declared the $329-million National Broadband Network (NBN) project with China’s ZTE Corp. moot and academic because President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had cancelled it, her ally, Sen. Joker Arroyo, called for an end to the Senate inquiry into the deal.
But Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, chair of the blue ribbon committee, said his panel was still waiting for an insider account by former Speaker Jose de Venecia and two other members of the “Greedy Group”—businessman Ruben Reyes and former police officer Quirino “Torch” Arellano.
Cayetano told reporters he was giving De Venecia up to the end of August to make his long-awaited appearance or else the Senate would move on and try to get either Reyes or Arellano to tie the “loose ends” in the Senate’s longest running investigation.
Arroyo vs Cayetano
“He’s (Arroyo) just playing into the call of Malacañang to end the investigation because it wants to resurrect the project. They are trying to protect the President at all cost. But they are barking up the wrong tree, they should just tell Cabinet officials to cooperate so the investigation will be completed,” Cayetano said.
While the NBN-ZTE case was heard practically at the same time by the Supreme Court and the Senate, Arroyo pointed out that the chamber had yet to come out with a report after 11 months, while the tribunal had issued two rulings.
The high court upheld former National Economic and Development Authority Director General Romulo Neri’s right to invoke executive privilege before junking Iloilo Vice Gov. Rolex Suplico’s attempt to nullify the contract to wire the nation’s bureaucracy digitally through the Internet.
Arroyo slammed the Cayetano committee for “stalking witness after witness.”
“The Senate must be mindful not to be overcome or overtaken by events, to be trapped in the quicksand of irrelevance,” Arroyo said.
“Right now, it’s like a petrified fossil in a dance hall waiting to be danced to by Speaker De Venecia in his sweet time,” Arroyo said in a statement.
Lopsided court decision
Arroyo said there was little point in pursuing the case since the high court had already rendered “a lopsided, clean-cut 11-3 decision denying and dismissing the petitions to nullify and void the ZTE contracts” because the President had already informed China’s leader of her decision to cancel the ZTE contract as early as October last year.
But Cayetano said that the President had a history of going back on her word (she declared that she would not run in 2004 but she did) and the public needed a formal document nullifying the contract with finality.
“It might be dead but this government has always had problems with ghosts—ghost precincts, ghost voters, ghost projects,” Cayetano said, referring to claims that Ms Arroyo stole the 2004 presidential election—a charge she has denied.
Cayetano maintained that it was too early to “pass our papers, finished or not finished.”
From deal maker to whistle-blower
The earliest the Senate could come out with its reports will be after August when the deadline for De Venecia’s appearance expires, Cayetano said. “The feeling of most senators is that we can’t wait for him forever.”
“De Venecia will give the whole picture but it will be difficult for him to turn from deal maker into whistle-blower. The tricky part is whether he would want to incriminate himself,” Cayetano said.
Should De Venecia get cold feet and snub the Senate, Cayetano said he was banking on Reyes to attend (after his lawyer declared that his client was willing to testify) and De la Torre to provide a deposition (the former police officer was too sick to attend the Senate hearings) to be facilitated by Sen. Panfilo Lacson.
Reyes and De la Torre, along with former Commission on Elections Chair Benjamin Abalos and cable television executive Leo San Miguel, were part of the “Greedy Group” that brokered the bloated NBN-ZTE contract, according to ZTE witness Dante Madriaga.
Ms Arroyo canceled the NBN-ZTE deal after her husband was implicated in an alleged bribery attempt by De Venecia’s namesake son, a losing bidder. Neri’s testimony that Abalos offered him P200 million to approve the deal sparked renewed calls for the President to step aside. Neri later decided to clam up amid demands in the Senate to tell all.
Suplico Tuesday said he would ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision. He said the tribunal should not have taken Ms Arroyo’s word that the project had been canceled.
“She has a credibility problem,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer, parent company of INQUIRER.net.
Fears of resurrection
Bayan Muna party-list Rep. Teodoro Casiño earlier raised the possibility of the NBN project being “raised from the dead” through the Department of Transportation and Communications’ Infrastructure Project. The project would initially cost P300 million to link 21 agencies, he said.
“My sources tell me that since the initial payoffs delivered to the group of Abalos and the First Gentleman have not been returned despite the NBN’s cancellation, then the Filipino counterparts are still expected to deliver their end of the bargain,” Casiño said.
If the administration changes its mind and decides to continue with the NBN deal then another case could be filed, said court spokesperson Jose Midas Marquez. “There will be a different set of facts,” he said.
Dissenting opinion
Justice Antonio Carpio, in a dissenting opinion, warned that “the ZTE supply contract itself was capable of being resurrected.” He also said that the NBN-ZTE deal was void from the beginning for violating the country’s Constitution and laws.
“It is axiomatic that one party to a bilateral contract cannot unilaterally declare a contract discontinued or canceled. Clearly, this case is far from being moot,” Carpio said.
Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales, also dissenting, said cancellation was “not an excuse for the Court not to decide the petitions on the merits.”
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