Palace stands by new man

Malacañang on Thursday stood by President Benigno Aquino III’s choice of just-retired Lt. Gen. Gaudencio Pangilinan Jr. as the new chief of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) despite the fact the appointee is facing a plunder charge in the Department of Justice.

Saying that Mr. Aquino believed Pangilinan would be able to reform the bureau due to his strong counterintelligence background, presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda added that “more than (giving him) the benefit of the doubt, it’s a man presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.”

Pangilinan was among the military officers charged early this year with plunder by Army Lt. Col. George Rabusa for their alleged involvement in fund anomalies in the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

In a press briefing, Lacierda said there was “no hesitation at all” on the part of the President in appointing Pangilinan despite the plunder complaint in which Rabusa accused Pangilinan of being the “bagman” of the late AFP Chief of Staff Arturo Enrile.

The President signed Pangilinan’s appointment papers on July 19, or three days before he retired as chief of the Northern Luzon Command on July 22. Pangilinan is a member of Philippine Military Academy Class 1979 and his field of specialization is intelligence and operations.

Lacierda initially said that Rabusa’s lawyers made a mistake in filing a plunder complaint against Pangilinan because plunder was not yet a crime when the general served as executive assistant to Enrile in 1995. But Lacierda took back what he said when informed that plunder was already a crime in 1991.

Anyway, he said, Pangilinan had submitted his counter-affidavit and, “constitutionally speaking, a man is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.”

Lacierda denied Pangilinan was part of the “KKK or kakampi, kaklase, kabarilan (party mates, classmates, shooting buddies)” of Mr. Aquino.

“(Pangilinan) is not close to the President … we would like to disabuse the public that he is part of the alleged KKK,” Lacierda said.

As for the President following the practice of the previous administration of naming retired generals to the Cabinet, he said: “It depends on [their] qualifications.”

Lacierda said Mr. Aquino’s marching orders to Pangilinan were to “reform the agency … fix the BuCor, including those who tend to get out of jail and come back without proper authority.”

Asked how Pangilinan’s expertise in counterintelligence would help him reform the agency, Lacierda said there were “a lot of things going on in there that we were not aware of and it is something (the President) would like Mr. Pangilinan to really get to the bottom of…all the shenanigans in the BuCor.”