Government lawyers outclassed at Revilla et al. hearings
(From left) Sen. Bong Revilla, Janet Lim-Napoles and Richard Cambe: Will they be out on bail? INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines–It was like a law school classroom scene with aspiring lawyers hearing a mouthful from the professor who wanted them to learn to think on their feet.
Except that the students were real state prosecutors whom the Ombudsman had tasked to exact justice from Sen. Bong Revilla, the member of his legislative staff Richard Cambe and businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles for embezzling billions of pesos in public funds.
And there was not just one but three professors who were actually the justices in the Sandiganbayan First Division who were trying the three
accused on plunder and graft charges over the P10-billion pork barrel scam.
It was the Philippines’ biggest official corruption case in more than a decade and yet the prosecutors were all thumbs, getting a trouncing from the seasoned defense lawyers almost at every turn during the initial presentation of evidence in the bail hearings for Revilla, Cambe and Napoles.
The justices couldn’t conceal their impatience, repeatedly panning the bumbling attempt of Prosecutors Joefferson B. Torribio, Jacinto de la Cruz Jr., Lyn G. Dimayuga and Emerita O. Francia to stop the accused from walking out of jail.
Specifically, the division chair, Efren de la Cruz, and Associate Justice Rodolfo A. Ponferrada knocked the prosecutors’ choice and sequencing of witnesses and their performance in extracting testimony from their witnesses.
Ponferrada questioned the prosecutors’ decision to put Commission on Audit (COA) Assistant Commissioner Susan Garcia on the witness stand first when they should have started with the main protagonists in the case, whistle-blowers Benhur Luy, Merlina Suñas and Marina Sula.
Ponferrada likened the presentation of witnesses to a telenovela where the audience wanted to hear from the main players as early as possible.
Torribio argued that the prosecution started with Garcia to provide the big picture, the P224.5-million allegedly embezzled by Revilla, Cambe, Napoles, her nephew Ronald John B. Lim and her driver John Raymund de Asis (Lim and De Asis are at large).
But Revilla’s lawyer Joel Bodegon, Cambe’s lawyer Remigio Michael A. Ancheta II and Napoles’ lawyer Stephen L. David countered that Garcia’s testimony would be only hearsay.
Ponferrada said the prosecutors should bring their witnesses to court to allow the magistrates to question them at any time during the trial.
Justice De la Cruz showed annoyance at the prosecutors’ amateurish ways in trying to make Garcia state the amounts covered by the 12 special allotment release orders (Saro) that were allegedly used to facilitate the release of Revilla’s pork barrel funds to fake nongovernment organizations controlled by Napoles, said to be the mastermind of the pork barrel scam.
On several occasions, Ponferrada had to correct the prosecutors each time they got their numbers wrong in the Saros being presented by the witness, drawing chuckles from people in the courtroom.
“You should have read the Ombudsman resolution because it is all there. You brought a lot of documents but you did not bring the basic document,” Ponferrada told the prosecutors.
In contrast, the defense lawyers were quick to pounce on any shortcoming of the prosecution to make their point that the bail hearings were being unduly stretched.
At the heart of the defense team’s argument was the claim of forgery involving the signatures of both Revilla and Cambe in the documents being shown by the prosecution.
Bodegon, wearing round horn-rimmed glasses and a paisley bow tie, said that with the way the prosecutors were adding witnesses and evidence, the bail hearings would take a year.
De la Cruz assured Bodegon, however, that the court would not allow that to happen.
Aside from Garcia and the whistle-blowers, the prosecution planned to bring more than a dozen witnesses to the bail hearings.
They are National Bureau of Investigation special investigator Joey I. Narciso; Department of Budget and Management officials Lorenzo Drapete and Orlando M. Magdaraog; Ombudsman Field Investigation Office members Gerhard Basco, Junelyn Pagunsun, Gialyn Yebron, Jose Romano Francisco and Rholie Besona; managers and representatives of Metrobank’s Dasmariñas, T. Pinpin and Jose Abad Santos branches and Land Bank of the Philippines Pasig Capitol branch; a representative from the Anti-Money Laundering Council Secretariat; and the records custodian of the Senate blue ribbon committee.
The prosecutors’ amateur show at the First Division on Thursday was a continuation of their failure last month to amend the charges against Revilla and Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Juan Ponce Enrile to show the three lawmakers as the central figures in the plundering of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and not Napoles.
The First Division handling Revilla’s case and the Fifth Division hearing Estrada’s case rejected the amendments, telling the prosecutors that the changes could alter the finding of probable cause to make the two senators stand trial and lead to orders to release them from jail.
Trying to avoid a third failure, the prosecutors withdrew a motion to amend the plunder charges against Enrile in the Third Division.
The early setbacks for the prosecution drew criticism of the government’s handling of the pork barrel cases, with University of the Philippines law professor Harry Roque urging the Ombudsman to revamp its prosecution teams.
“I’d like to think the Ombudsman wants to win the cases in court, not just file them in court,” Roque said.
Roque suggested that the Ombudsman replace Danilo Lopez, the lead prosecutor in Estrada’s case, who he said could not afford to lose the PDAF case the way he lost the P365-million lamppost case in Cebu City in 2008.
He also criticized the cochair of the main prosecution panel, Deputy Special Prosecutor John Turalba, who he said moved for the dismissal of graft charges against Reynaldo Varilla, a retired deputy director general of the Philippine National Police, and two others in 2008 in a defective case involving the illegal provision of submachine guns to the Philippine Marine Corps.
After the prosecutors’ early setbacks in court, Roque wondered aloud where the pork barrel scam cases were headed.
Originally posted at 12:53 am | Friday, July 11, 2014
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