Senator Edgardo Angara. FILE PHOTO
Senator Edgardo Angara Tuesday denounced as “malicious” a defense motion urging him to inhibit from the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona, citing multi-billion projects he had purportedly secured from the government and his son’s endorsement by President Benigno Aquino III as a senatorial candidate in the 2013 elections.
“To see how malicious” the defense motion was, Angara invited the court to the last paragraph that stated: “The only way Senator Angara can redeem himself is to vote for acquittal.”
“I’ve never seen logic, legal logic like this and therefore I take umbrage in this malicious paper,” he said.
“No argument, no persuasion can convince me that I should inhibit because this is a duty I will not abdicate,” he declared at the start of Day 36 of the impeachment trial.
Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile told both the defense and the prosecution that “none of you can sway us one way or the other.”
“And if you have any reason to believe that we are dishonest, say so candidly, and openly and we are ready, willing, able to defend ourselves,” he said.
“Why should he inhibit himself? His son is an adult. He is not a dependent of Senator Angara,” Enrile told reporters, referring to Aurora Rep. Juan Edgardo “Sonny” Angara, a spokesperson for the House prosecution.
Lead defense counsel Serafin Cuevas said his camp sought, in a seven-page motion, Angara’s inhibition owing to the “feeling” of the Chief Justice that he might not “obtain a cold neutrality” of the senator-judge.
“We never stated that everything stated thereon are debatably true, but we wanted to express, to give importance to the feeling of the Chief Justice in order that if a decision is made one way or the other, there is no doubt as to the impartiality and the lack of bias on the part of the deciding member of the Senate,” he said.
Conflict of interest
The elder Angara vowed to stay put and pointed out that Corona’s counsels were not helping his case. “Isn’t it that as a whole, this tactic is meant to antagonize the judge?”
Angara was the second senator defense lawyers had asked to inhibit. The first one was Sen. Franklin Drilon, an ally of President Aquino, for helping House prosecutors elicit information they had missed from witnesses during trial. Drilon ignored the call.
In the case of Angara, Corona’s lawyers cited conflict of interest: his son’s work with the prosecution team as spokesperson; endorsement by President Aquino of the son as a senatorial candidate of the ruling Liberal Party in the 2013 election; and the multibillion-peso projects approved by the government in his home province of Aurora.
Constitutional mandate
Saying he was mandated by the Constitution to sit as a judge in the trial, Angara said his son’s appointment as prosecution spokesperson was an “independent action of a coequal body in Congress, the House of Representatives.”
Among the projects in question are the P1.66-billion Baler-Casiguran Road Improvement Project and the P798.56-million Umiray Bridge Construction Project in Aurora, and the P1.81-billion Samar Pacific Coastal Road Project in the Visayas region.
“The scale and timing of these projects appear more as political favors and inducements, rather than just honest-to-goodness responses to development concerns,” the defense motion said.
“While such projects may involve legitimate infrastructure projects, their approval seems timed to coincide with the voting period of the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Corona and in preparation for the forthcoming 2013 national elections.”
Angara disowned two of the three projects.