Leni Robredo. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
NAGA CITY—It was scripted.
All that drama about lawyer Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo’s last-minute decision to file her Certificate of Candidacy after supporters marched to her house to beg her to run had been “scripted,” her political opponent, Rep. Luis Villafuerte, said Sunday.
Villafuerte, whose wife Nelly is pitted against Robredo for the congressional seat of the third district of Camarines Sur, claimed the widow of the late Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo had her certificate of nomination ready a week before the Oct. 5 deadline.
Villafuerte showed reporters Robredo’s certificate of nomination from the Liberal Party dated Sept. 29.
Robredo denied being aware of the LP nomination date.
She said the LP nomination was handed to her in the afternoon of Oct. 5 when she was about to file her COC. She signed the nomination in front of provincial election supervisor Noriel Badiola, she added.
But she conceded that it might be true that some people worked on her nomination documents even before she had made her decision to run.
“It could have been possible that the COC documents may have been prepared earlier because when I complained that I didn’t even have pictures, they told me all were ready and I only had to sign and thumb mark them,” she said.
Robredo dismissed insinuations that the pressure to run exerted by supporters who marched from the Naga City Hall to her house was part of a script.
“If it was scripted it will be the people who came to my house who could say something about that. They must be asked if it was scripted. And if it was scripted, I did not know that,” she said.
Robredo said she yielded to the demand for her to run “to preserve the process of selection and the unity of the group and people who supported her late husband in the 19 years he was Naga City mayor.”
Alberto Bercasio, LP treasurer in Camarines Sur, confirmed the Sept. 29 date on the LP nomination for Robredo but said she was not informed of it until the papers were handed to her on Oct. 5.