ZTE witnesses summoned to Abalos trial

MANILA, Philippines—Prosecutors from the  Office of the Ombudsman have asked the Sandiganbayan’s  Fourth Division to summon anew ZTE Corp. consultant Dante Madriaga and former Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Favila to the next hearing of the graft case against former elections chief Benjamin Abalos over the canceled national broadband network deal.

Madriaga and Favila are among the next batch of witnesses expected to appear when Abalos’ trial resumes on April 23 and 24.

The other witnesses that the prosecution asked the court to subpoena were lawyer Roberto Rafael Pulido and Ferdinand Gaite of the Confederation for Unity, Recognition and Advancement of Government Employees.

The witnesses had been summoned to appear in previous hearings, but were unable to attend.

This ongoing graft case against Abalos was filed in 2010, and he was charged with taking an interest in the NBN project which was not related to his duties as elections chief. The project sought to interconnect government offices nationwide through a more advanced telecommunications network.

Madriaga, who said he used to be a ZTE consultant for the NBN deal, had told a Senate inquiry that his bosses informed him that ZTE advanced $41 million to brokers of the contract. He alleged that the brokers included Abalos.

Favila, on the other hand, was an official of the Arroyo administration, which had entered into the $329 million NBN deal with China’s ZTE Corp. Pulido was among those who filed the case against officials involved in the NBN deal in the Office of the Ombudsman. Gaite was a critic of the Arroyo administration.

Then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo canceled the NBN deal in 2007 after allegations of kickpacks and that it was overpriced.

In December 2011, Abalos faced another graft charge in relation to the NBN deal after being named a co-accused of former President Arroyo in one of the criminal cases filed against her for having initially approved the project in spite of the alleged irregularities.

Arroyo was charged with two counts of graft and one count of violation of the code of conduct for public officials for her approval of the NBN deal. Aside from Abalos, her co-accused in one of her graft cases are her husband Jose Miguel Arroyo and former Transportation and Communication Secretary Leandro Mendoza. The trial for the latest batch of graft cases has yet to begin.