Major figures in Binay wrangle are NP members

Vice President Jejomar Binay. FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines – Senators Alan Peter Cayetano and Antonio Trillanes IV have thrown everything at Vice President Jejomar Binay, and Cavite Governor Juanito Victor “Jonvic’’ Remulla has fiercely defended the Vice President.

Nothing wrong with that except that Cayetano, Trillanes and Remulla are members of the same party: the Nacionalista Party.

As the hostilities escalated over Binay’s alleged corruption, the old party would have imploded. But given the apparently nebulous ties among some of its members, the party is getting by, but not totally unscathed.

“Let them be,” Senator Cynthia Villar, wife of party leader former Sen. Manuel Villar Jr., said in an interview after Congress resumed sessions last Monday.

In a kind of a déjà vu, her husband was investigated by his colleagues over the diversion of a road project to pass through his property, as Binay is now over an allegedly overpriced carpark in Makati, ahead of a presidential election.

Before the 2010 presidential vote, the Senate committee of the whole inquired into allegations that Villar’s real estate firm benefited from right of way deals in connection with the C-5 road extension in Parañaque and Las Piñas.

It comes with the territory, Senator Villar said.

“As Alan said, if this was done to Senator Manny, it can be done to everybody. That’s part of it. I think that’s the tradition in the Senate that we can’t change,” she said.

Having sought the Senate Blue Ribbon subcommittee hearing on the allegedly overpriced P2.28-billion carpark, Cayetano and Trillanes have been calling witnesses to the inquiry.

One witness, former Makati Vice Mayor Ernesto Mercado, has accused Binay of ordering the rigging of bidding of infrastructure projects to favor a contractor, and of pocketing kickbacks.

Mercado has also charged that Binay owned a P1.2-billion, luxuriously appointed 350-hectare farm estate in Rosario, Batangas.

This has put Binay and his camp on the defensive, with Remulla leading the job of speaking for the evasive Vice President, and speaking out against the senators. Binay’s camp has flatly denied the charges.

While the two senators and the governor often tangle in the media, Villar said, the party respected their actions.

She said Remulla himself manifested that he would quit the NP and join Binay once he has formed a new party, possibly for his run for the presidency in 2016.

“You can’t stop people from moving from one party to another. That’s their personal choice. At the Nacionalista Party, we want members who want to stay with us,” she said.

The senator said the party has no plans of asking Remulla to leave.

“If they want to do something, do it,” she said.

The inquiry and the crossing of swords have not come without cost to party members.

Cayetano, for one, saw his rating tumble from 5 percent to 1 in a September Pulse Asia survey of voters’ preferences for potential presidential candidates. It was so low that the senator said he was now unsure whether to run for President.

He reckoned that he was fighting a popular personality, and the public sensed he was merely politicking. In the coming hearings, he hopes the audience would see it in the light of rooting out corruption.

After the subcommittee wraps up the inquiry, Cayetano said he would go back to the public, and articulate his stand on issues, and from there, see how he’d fare in the polls.

If by the middle of next year he doesn’t land in the top four among aspirants for the presidency, it may be time to put off his presidential campaign plans, he said.

“You have to be in the top four. If you’re not in the top four by the middle of next year, you’re not a contender. Secondly, you have to have hard-core believers,” he said.

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