Leila presses attack on Aguirre over VIP treatment of inmates

Sen. Leila De lima. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/ MARIANNE BERMUDEZ

Sen. Leila de Lima yesterday stood by the authenticity of the contents of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) confidential memorandum that purportedly granted special treatment to high-profile inmates in exchange for testifying against her at a congressional inquiry last year.

Sought for comment, De Lima shot down Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II’s claim on Friday that her information was “hearsay.”

De Lima said justice and BuCor officials might now be pressuring the official who wrote the memo, BuCor legal chief Alvin Herrera Lim, to amend his memo.

She said Lim should not be faulted because he merely reported what transpired during a meeting between officials of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Philippine National Police and BuCor on the custodial arrangement for eight convicts moved to a military facility at the height of the House hearings last year.

The inquiry focused on the proliferation of illegal drugs at National Bilibid Prison under De Lima’s watch as justice chief.

The drug convicts are now being held at the custodial center of the Intelligence Service of the AFP.

The convicts were among national penitentiary inmates who had testified against De Lima before the House justice committee hearings, claiming she sought and received from them drug money to fund her senatorial bid.

‘Rectifying’ the memo

“I think Lim is being pressured to rectify his memo,” said De Lima in an interview with the Inquirer.

“From the tenor of his unembellished memo, Lim was simply reporting about what factually transpired during a meeting, what he heard, what was discussed. There was nothing suggested or insinuated in the report,” she said.

The senator noted Aguirre’s disclosure that Justice Undersecretary Reynante Orceo had ordered Lim, through a Jan. 4, 2017 letter, to correct his Dec. 9, 2016 memo, which was a narration of what transpired during a Dec. 2, 2016 meeting among the three agencies.

The justice chief had said Orceo’s letter sought to clarify to Lim that “…the secretary nor any of his representative from the Department (of Justice) did not authorize nor give instruction to give the inmates special treatment.”

Orceo also apparently told Lim in the letter that “such insinuations and suggestion should be rectified and clarified accordingly,” said the senator.

“Why would the usec (undersecretary) order the writer of the memo-report to rectify the same? Was the usec present in that Dec. 2 interagency meeting? Does he have personal knowledge of what transpired therein?” De Lima asked.