Secretary Edwin Lacierda INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
Malacañang on Monday dismissed Chief Justice Renato Corona’s allegation of a conspiracy against him as nothing but a desperate ploy to deflect attention from himself.
“The man on the dock is the Chief Justice. He is there, impeached and undergoing trial, because of his behavior. He has no one to blame for this but himself,” presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda said in a statement.
Lacierda was reacting to the statement of Corona that he was a big obstacle to someone who did not want Hacienda Luisita distributed, to a person who wanted to be Vice President in 2010 but lost and to an associate justice who wanted to be the next Chief Justice.
Lacierda said Corona’s “conspiracy theory ignores reality and plain facts,” noting that the Aquino administration through the Department of Agriculture had pushed and argued in the high court for the distribution of lands to tenants in the sugar estate.
“His other allegations, concerning the President’s running mate and an associate justice of the Supreme Court, go beyond being merely undignified—they are slanderous attacks for the purpose of deflecting attention. No Chief Justice has ever demeaned himself by the gutter language he used this morning,” he said.
Lacierda said that the Palace believed that the “truth will set the judiciary free.”
Just answer issues
For his part, Transportation Secretary Manuel Roxas II told Corona to just answer the issues raised against him in the impeachment trial rather than “invent and make stories.”
“The trial is about the very serious offenses against our people for betrayal of public trust. He should not write comic stories and fairy tales of alleged conspiracies. He should face the truth and his conscience. He should not drag anyone,” Roxas said in a statement released by the Palace.
The agrarian reform secretary and the solicitor general took umbrage at Corona’s statement that the impeachment trial was a vendetta stemming from the high court’s decision to distribute Hacienda Luisita to the farmers.
In a joint statement, Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio de los Reyes and Solicitor General Joel Cadiz said they “strongly disagree” with Corona’s declaration that the campaign to oust him was rooted in the controversial sugar estate owned by relatives of President Benigno Aquino III.
Consistent
De los Reyes and Cadiz said the Aquino administration was consistent in its stance that the stock distribution option exercised by the Cojuangco family should be void and was not in the spirit of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law.
The two officials also stressed that the government consistently pushed for the full distribution of the land.
“When the Supreme Court decided in November 2011 to fully distribute the hacienda to its farmworker-beneficiaries, the Aquino administration readily stated that it will immediately implement the Honorable Court’s order as soon as it becomes final and executory,” the statement said.
The prosecution team of the House of Representatives brushed aside the “conspiracy theory” being peddled by Corona.
People’s conspiracy
Marikina Representative Romero Quimbo, the House panel’s spokesperson, said the move to oust Corona was a “conspiracy of the people” working against the magistrate.
“If there are conspirators here, they are the people who feel that he has betrayed his sworn duty to protect no one,” Quimbo said.
He said it was unethical for Corona to accuse some people, including a colleague in the Supreme Court, of working together to remove him from the tribunal.
“I cannot imagine how he will be able to continue governing in the Supreme Court when he has literally accused even his colleagues of conspiring against him,” Quimbo said.
Quezon Representative Lorenzo Tañada III, the panel’s deputy spokesperson, said Corona should refrain from his “diversionary attacks” and from discussing the merits of his impeachment case in public now that the impeachment trial had begun.
In Concepcion, Tarlac, Mr. Aquino said the World Bank report critical of the high court’s management of a loan it extended to the tribunal buttressed his call for changes in the judiciary.
“We can now say there is an independent foreign party that has complained about the way the Supreme Court runs things,” the President said in Filipino. With a report from Kristine L. Alave
Originally posted: 06:00 pm | Tuesday, January 16th, 2012