Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — The lawyers of Senator Juan Ponce Enrile have demanded that the Philippine Daily Inquirer apologize and retract its “malicious’’ story tagging him as the mastermind of the P10-billion pork barrel scam.
The Ponce Enrile Reyes & Manalastas Law offices also asked Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, as well as the National Press Club and the Philippine Press Institute to investigate the story, and impose sanctions on the Inquirer.
“On behalf of Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, we demand that you retract, and immediately apologize, for your malicious and false publications against the Senator, and hence, cease and desist from publishing further falsehoods about Senator Enrile,’’ they said in a Nov. 22 letter to Editor in Chief Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc.
The lawyers said the report was “obviously malicious’’ since the preliminary investigation of the plunder complaint against Enrile and several others in the Ombudsman had yet to start, and the subpoenas had yet to be served when the Inquirer published the story.
They added that its publication was “clearly malicious and false’’ because Morales herself denied the existence of an eight-page report from one of her assistants tagging Enrile as the mastermind.
“You made it appear that there is already a final declaration from the Ombudsman’s office that Senator Enrile is supposedly the mastermind of the P10 billion pork barrel scam,’’ they said in the letter to Magsanoc.
In last Thursday’s banner titled “JPE unseen hand in pork scam,’’ the Inquirer quoted an eight-page report by Assistant Ombudsman Joselito Pangon as identifying Enrile as the brains of the scam.
The report described Jessica Lucila “Gigi’’ Gonzales-Reyes and Jose Antonio Evangelista, erstwhile aides of Enrile, as being closely associated with alleged pork barrel scam operator Janet Lim-Napoles.
“Clearly, no matter how layered the scheme may have been perpetrated or unrelated the players may appear, all facts point to Senator Enrile as the unseen hand directing the compass and the tempo of the whole orchestra,’’ the memorandum said.
Enrile, together with Napoles, Senators Jose “Jinggoy’’ Estrada and Ramon Revilla Jr., and 34 others, is facing a plunder complaint before the Ombudsman over the alleged conversion of lawmakers’ pork barrel into kickbacks.
Enrile’s lawyers lamented that instead of retracting its original report, the Inquirer declared at the www.inquirer.net that it was standing by its report.
They observed that Inquirer indicated that the eight-page report was part of a 246-page memo that “supposedly’’ confirmed that Enrile masterminded the scam, even carrying a PDF copy of the memo.
“Curiously, however, even the supposed PDF copy says, on its first page, that its subject is merely the PDAF of Senator Enrile, and on page 4, that its scope is `centered on the P345,000,000 audited PDAF of Senator Juan Ponce Enrile,’’ they said.
Inquirer’s conclusion on Enrile’s key role in the scam was “obviously false,’’ and unsupported by the memo.
The letter was signed by Joseph B. Sagandoy Jr., Edwardson L. Ong, Erwin G. Matib and Kay Angela R. Peñaflorida.
In a separate Nov. 22 letter to Morales, the lawyers asked the Ombudsman to investigate the Inquirer report, the leak of supposed memo, and provide “necessary sanctions.’’
They said the Ombudsman should secure the emails and phone records of “persons involved’’ in the Ombudsman and the Inquirer.
The lawyers also asked her to clarify the existence and import of the memo, and furnish them copies of it.
As it appeared in the story, the memo was supposedly prepared by Team 1 of the Special Team of Investigators, which would also handle the preliminary investigation of the complaint, they observed.
“We are surprised at how the Philippine Daily Inquirer can boldly say that it has obtained a supposed memo (regardless of the number of pages) from within your office, which was not even cited in any of your official press releases,’’ they wrote Morales.
They pointed out that access to the memo, if at all it’s existent, “may appear’’ to be a violation of the prohibition against public disclosure under the Ombudsman Act, and the Rules of Procedure of the Office of the Ombudsman.
The lawyers said they were just as concerned with the content of the memo, whose publication has created “tremendous prejudicial publicity’’ against Enrile.
“The theory seems to be that the very lack of evidence against the Senator (having been called the `unseen’ hand, referring to a `layering’ that has no trace of him) forms the very proof of his guilt as the supposed mastermind. This is a brilliant new legal doctrine! And he is most guilty when he has not been given a chance to be heard,’’ they said.
If there was such a memo recommending the filing of charges against Enrile, there was no point for the senator to answer the accusations against him since Ombudsman officers have concluded he masterminded the scam, the lawyers said.
In effect, this “prosecutorial misconduct’’ has converted the preliminary investigation process into a “moro-moro’’ with a “pre-ordained outcome that will totally disregard any argument or evidence’’ to be presented by Enrile.
In their Nov. 22 letters to the NPC and PPI, the lawyers said the Inquirer did not ascertain the veracity of the report before publishing it, “in clear violation’’ of the Philippine Journalist’s Code of Ethics.
Both the NPC and PPI should investigate the matter, and sanction the Inquirer and others “involved’’ in the “false and biased reporting’’ against Enrile, they said.
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