Revamp prosecution teams, Ombudsman urged

MANILA, Philippines–An activist-lawyer on Sunday urged the Ombudsman to revamp its prosecution teams in the pork barrel scam scandal, fearing that they might botch the pork plunder cases against Senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla.

“I’d like to think the Ombudsman wants to win the cases in court, not just file them in court,” said lawyer Harry Roque, associate professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law.

Roque cited acting Ombudsman Director Danilo Lopez, who was designated head of the special panel prosecuting Estrada for plunder in the Sandiganbayan.

“The Ombudsman has to replace Lopez. He can’t lose the PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund) cases the same way he lost the Cebu lamppost case,” Roque said in a text message.

Lopez took a lot of heat from his peers at the Office of the Ombudsman in the Visayas after the Sandiganbayan dismissed criminal charges against businessman Isabelo Braza, one of the suppliers of the lampposts worth P365 million and which were found to be overpriced by as much as 10 times when these were bought by the Cebu City government in preparation for hosting the 12th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) meeting in 2006.

In 2008, Lopez moved to withdraw the case for lack of evidence and he later claimed that the case was defective because the Ombudsman was pressured by the press into filing it.

Even the cochair of the main prosecution panel, Deputy Special Prosecutor John Turalba, has a spotty record in the Ombudsman, Roque said.

In one of his cases, Roque said, Turalba’s prosecution team  moved for the dismissal of a graft case against Reynaldo Varilla, a retired deputy director general of the Philippine National Police, and two others in 2008.

Varilla and his alleged cohorts were implicated in the illegal disposal of 72 Heckler & Koch MP5 9-mm submachine guns by Trimark Ventures Trading Corp. to the Marine Corps, their withdrawal from the police Firearms and Explosives Division, the loss of the firearms and the diversion of some of them to a gunrunning syndicate in 2000, Roque said.

Roque echoed the concerns raised by legal observers about where the plunder cases involving the three senators and businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles, the alleged mastermind of the P10-billion pork barrel scam, were headed after the Ombudsman prosecutors failed in their attempt to amend the charges to shift the main responsibility from Napoles to the lawmakers.

The Sandiganbayan rejected the amendments last week, warning the prosecutors that changing the original information could lead to the senators’ being ordered released from detention.

While the prosecutors claimed that the amendments “merely add specifications to eliminate vagueness in the information and merely state with additional precision something [that] is already contained in the original information,” critics saw the failure as a sign of weakness of the plunder cases.