Jinggoy feels betrayed by close friend of Estradas

Sen. Jinggoy Estrada. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Senator Jose “Jinggoy” Estrada said he felt betrayed that a longtime family friend would do this to him.

Reacting to erstwhile suspect Ruby Tuason’s dramatic emergence as a state witness in the P10-billion pork barrel scam who would reportedly deliver damning evidence against him, Estrada said Tuason, a former social secretary of his father and a family friend of long standing, must be doing it “to save her own skin.”

“I am quite sad that she came out into the open without any basis. At our expense, just to save her own skin… she will surprise everyone and fabricate stories. That’s not right,” Estrada said in a phone interview.

Prove it

He dared Tuason to prove that she gave him millions of pesos in kickbacks from his pork barrel entitlements.

“She should have to prove that she gives me money in the Senate and that she gives me money at my residence,” he said.

Estrada was largely reacting to Justice Secretary Leila de Lima’s narration on Friday of the highlights from Tuason’s explosive affidavit that De Lima said further strengthened the government’s evidence against Estrada and Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile.

Repeated calls and messages to Enrile for a comment on Tuason’s affidavit were left unanswered as of late afternoon Friday.

Evidence furnished by a host of whistle-blowers led by Benhur Luy, a former aide of alleged scam mastermind Janet Lim-Napoles, led to the filing of plunder charges against Estrada, Enrile, Sen. Ramon Revilla Jr., Napoles and dozens of other respondents that included members of the staff of the legislators implicated in the scam.

Named as conduit

Tuason—who served as social secretary to Estrada’s father, deposed President and convicted plunderer Joseph Estrada who is now mayor of Manila—was named by the whistle-blowers as Napoles’ conduit to Sentors Enrile and Estrada.

Estrada, Enrile and Revilla have denied any wrongdoing with regard to the use of their pork barrel allotments, officially known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).

Estrada denied that Tuason was on his staff or that he had authorized her to deal with Napoles on his behalf in the disbursement of his PDAF.

“I never authorized anybody for that matter to deal with Napoles,” he said.

Estrada said that if Tuason had received money from Napoles, none of it went to his pocket—it all went into hers.

“She admitted getting money. She said she gave it to me in the Senate. My goodness! How can she give it to me in the Senate? She passed through [the basement] parking?” he said.

“The only reason why she wanted to be met by my driver, my security guard at the basement parking was because she was bringing food,” he said.

But he acknowledged that Tuason’s brother, Ralph Chan, was a consultant in his office.

“She asked me to hire him,” Estrada said.

Estrada said it was actress Lorna Tolentino, who introduced him to Napoles, not Tuason, as the latter claims.

“I didn’t know Napoles in 2004 [when Tuason supposedly introduced them]. I only knew Napoles in 2008… through Lorna Tolentino during the wake of Rudy Fernandez [Tolentino’s husband],” he said.

“Lorna is a living witness. You can ask her,” Estrada added.

Two reasons

Estrada mentioned two reasons that could have led Tuason to testify against him and directly involve him in the pork barrel scam.

One was that he refused to give her money when she asked for some after she fled to the United States to escape the controversy.

“I once called her in October. I already knew then that she already left… I was asking her how she was. And then, toward the end of the conversation, she was already asking money from me,” Estrada said.

“I told her, ‘What will I give you? Both of us are facing charges.’ That’s why she got upset with me,” he said.

Questionable transactions

Estrada said Tuason must have succumbed to pressure from the National Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the Ombudsman, who he said followed Tuason to the US and talked to her there.

He said Tuason had many questionable transactions that would have made it quite easy for government investigators to pressure her to talk.

“And when they came back, it was all ironed out. She’s already in the Witness Protection Program,” he said.

Estrada believes there was a “sinister” plan to make sure he, Enrile and Revilla “went down” in the pork barrel scam.

“The way I see it, the case against us must be so weak—because it’s all based on hearsay—that they got a witness who’s willing to testify against us just to save her neck at our expense,” he said.

Likened to Ocampo

Estrada’s father, the Manila mayor, said he was confident that his son will be able defend himself against the charges.

“These witnesses are oftentimes used by some people to bring others down,” he said of Tuason’s surfacing as a state witness and implicating his son.

According to Manila City Hall information officer Diego Cagahastian, the mayor likened Tuason to banker Clarissa Ocampo, one of the witnesses who testified against him in his impeachment trial.

Cagahastian quoted the elder Estrada as saying that “like Ocampo who was used by the opposition to vilify him and remove him from the presidency, there might also be a group of people behind Tuason’s return to the country and turning state witness in the pork barrel scam.”

The ousted President was also quoted by Cagahastian as saying that “Ocampo was able to invest in a big Japanese restaurant” after his ouster.

“It means that she (Ocampo) made money,” the elder Estrada was quoted as saying.

Ocampo, a senior executive at the defunct Equitable Bank, testified during the ex-President’s 2000 impeachment trial that she was just a foot away from Joseph Estrada when the latter signed the bank documents of the controversial Jose Velarde account.

Ocampo’s testimony helped in clinching the case for the prosecution against Joseph Estrada who was ousted in the second Edsa People Power Revolution in January 2001 after his impeachment trial was aborted. He was convicted of plunder and sentenced to a jail term of up to 40 years in 2007, but was immediately pardoned by his successor, former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Not his social secretary

The disgraced ex-President, who was elected mayor of Manila last year, confirmed that he was friends with Tuason and her late husband, Butch, for a very long time. He had appointed Butch as chair of the Philippine Sports Commission in 1998.

But he denied that Tuason served as his social secretary. He said she was a mere Malacañang staffer handling regular office matters.

He described Tuason’s job as mainly coordinating catering requests whenever there were events or activities in Malacañang, said Cagahastian.

The mayor also said that he and Tuason “haven’t seen nor talked to each other for a long time.”

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