The Sandiganbayan has denied the bid of former Maguindanao officer in charge governor, Datu Sajid Islam Ampatuan, to dismiss his cases involving the anomalous payment of P16.32 million to a nonexistent food supplier in 2009.
In a resolution dated Nov. 2, the antigraft court’s Fifth Division found no merit in Ampatuan’s claim that the Ombudsman took eight years to investigate and violated his right to the speedy disposition of his case.
The court noted that Ampatuan included the Commission on Audit’s (COA) special audit into the provincial government’s transactions in computing the length of the Ombudsman’s investigation, even as former COA chair Gracia Pulido-Tan endorsed the audit results to the Ombudsman only in March 2014.
Excluding the commission’s audit, the court said that it actually took the Ombudsman two years and five months to finish the preliminary investigation and come up with a finding of probable cause against Ampatuan in August 2016.
“It was only upon receipt of this letter-endorsement that the preliminary investigation started in this case. The audit examination done previous to this cannot therefore be said to be part of the fact-finding process under the Office of the Ombudsman,” the court noted.
It said that the time spent by the Ombudsman was not unreasonable because “there are voluminous documents involved” in the cases.
Ampatuan also failed to explain specifically how the Ombudsman prejudiced his interest, read the resolution penned by Associate Justice Rafael R. Lagos.
The cases docketed SB-17-CRM-0942 to SB-17-CRM-0977 consist of one count of violation of the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, one count of malversation, and 34 counts of falsification of public documents.
In the said cases, prosecutors accused Ampatuan of making it appear that the funds were paid for various food supplies from Henry Merchandising, which allegedly turned out to be fictitious.
This batch of cases represent 36 of the 272 filed by the Ombudsman from April to May regarding various anomalies during Ampatuan’s stint as officer in charge of the provincial government in 2009.
These irregularities took place months before the Nov. 23, 2009, Maguindanao massacre, where 58 persons, including 32 media workers, were killed in one of the worst election incidents and press killings in history.