Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo camp says De Lima is ‘going bananas’

Ex-president and now Pampanga Rep.  Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said on Friday that Sen. Leila De Lima’s accusation that she was part of a cabal out to destroy the former justice secretary was “utter absurdity.”

Arroyo’s legal counsel, Ferdinand Topacio, said De Lima was only muddling the issue when she alleged a conspiracy to destroy her.  Others that were named as part of the plot were President Duterte, former Senators Bong Revilla Jr., Jinggoy Estrada and Juan Ponce Enrile,

“In her desperate attempt to extricate herself from a legal quagmire of her own doing, it appears that Sen. Leila De Lima is lashing out at everything that moves and attributing blame on everyone but herself,” Topacio said in a statement.

“It seems that De Lima is going bananas, specifically of the ‘saba’ variety,” Topacio said.

He was alluding to a remark by an inmate at the New Bilibid Prison (NBP) who testified at a congressional hearing that he saw De Lima hand fed bananas to Ronnie Dayan, a former body guard and alleged bagman who collected money from drug lords.

De Lima, one of the fiercest critics of Mr. Duterte, was the subject of a House inquiry, which sought to investigate her alleged links to Bilibid drug lords and her complicity to illegal drug trafficking in the prison.

She had accused Mr. Duterte and his allies of being behind a concerted effort to ruin her in retaliation for her criticisms of the President’s bloody drug war, which has claimed thousands of lives.

“The utter absurdity of her allegations is at once evident,” Topacio said. “While I cannot pretend to speak for the others pointed to by her, I must emphasize that Mrs. Arroyo is busy making up for lost time by serving her constituents and spending quality time with her family.”

Arroyo “has better things to do than bother with a creature like De Lima,” Topacio said.

“De Lima is trying to muddle the issue by finger-pointing when she should be explaining to the people why scores of witnesses—not only Bilibid inmates, but former subordinates, aides and colleagues in the Department of Justice—have testified clearly and emphatically under oath, that she has masterminded the transformation of the National Bilibid Prison into the hub of the nationwide drug trade,” he said.