JUSTICE Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II is pinning another alleged prison anomaly on Sen. Leila de Lima, this time claiming that the bulk of the money she ordered confiscated from high-profile inmates two years ago had gone “missing.”
In a press briefing on Tuesday, Aguirre said cash amounting to around P300 million was seized in a raid conducted at New Bilibid Prison (NBP) in 2014 but only P1.6 million was declared by then Justice Secretary De Lima.
The senator, who has increasingly come under siege from the administration after initiating a Senate probe on President Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, furiously dismissed Aguirre’s allegation as “fantastic.”
“Who are these new witnesses?” De Lima said in an interview with reporters. “Fantastic! Just ask all the agencies involved in the operations if that’s true. There’s nothing like that. P300 (million)?! My God, their stories are getting more fantastic. Can’t they think of something better?”
But according to Aguirre, an NBP inmate and a government intelligence agent submitted evidence on Monday night about the missing money.
“The raid inside Building 19 of Bilibid on Dec. 15, 2014, reported that P1.6 million in cash was seized, but the new witnesses said the team got more than P300 million in that particular raid,” he told reporters.
The new witnesses, he said, are willing to testify in the House inquiry on the how the illegal drug trade supposedly thrived at the state penitentiary during De Lima’s term as justice secretary.
Also in the briefing, the Cabinet official said he might soon present the alleged sex videos of De Lima and her driver Ronnie Dayan.
“I have personally watched the three sex videos, I can tell she’s the one in the video,” Aguirre said, adding that he even saw the senator’s pet dog in one of the clips.
He said the videos would help prove that the former justice secretary benefited from the illegal drug trade through Dayan.
A former Bureau of Corrections official earlier testified that there were two occasions he and escort Jovencio Ablen each delivered P5 million to De Lima’s house, and that they handed the money to Dayan in the presence of De Lima.
“If De lima denies her relationship with Dayan, we will show (the videos) to the House inquiry,” Aguirre added.
But De Lima said it would be against the law to have such material shown in public—“if there is indeed such a video.”
“Please stop doing this to me,” she stressed. “What satisfaction are you getting from all these? This is so vile. This is so, so foul… Are they going to go to such extent?”