SC dismisses petition to stop pork scam probe

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out for lack of merit a petition to stop the Office of the Ombudsman from investigating the P10-billion pork barrel scam.

Supreme Court spokesperson Theodore Te told reporters that the petitioner, Director General Antonio Ortiz of the Technology Resource Center (TRC), failed to show that the Department of Justice and the National Bureau of Investigation acted with grave abuse of discretion when they filed plunder charges against him and Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. and more than 30 other people in the Office of the Ombudsman in September.

Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile is also accused in the case, which stemmed from the misuse of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) by legislators allegedly in connivance with businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles.

Napoles allegedly siphoned off P10 billion from the PDAF, a pork barrel that channels funds to congressional districts, into her bank accounts through nonexistent projects, paying hundreds of millions of pesos in kickbacks to senators and congressmen who endorsed the projects, which were proposed by bogus nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that Napoles herself established.

The names of Estrada and Sen. Gregorio Honasan have been mentioned in recent days in the investigation of another scandal involving nonexistent projects that cost the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) P220 million, released to NGOs allegedly controlled by Napoles.

On Tuesday, Estrada and Honasan admitted requesting funds for agrarian reform projects in 2011, but said it was local officials and not they who endorsed the NGOs that proposed the projects.

Napoles’ contacts

In the case filed by the NBI in the Office of the Ombudsman, the government alleged that Ortiz and Director Dennis Cunanan were Napoles’ contacts in the TRC, which released P580.85 million from the PDAF allocations of Enrile, Revilla and Estrada to NGOs controlled by Napoles.

On Nov. 21, the Ombudsman announced that it had begun a preliminary investigation and directed 38 respondents, including Ortiz, to answer the charges against them and submit evidence in their defense within 10 days of the order dated Nov. 21.

The Ombudsman panel of investigators said it had found “enough basis to proceed with the preliminary investigation.”

Premature

Ortiz went to the Supreme Court to stop the preliminary investigation, but Te said the high tribunal found no merit in Ortiz’s petition.

Justice Secretary Leila de Lima said Tuesday that she had not seen Ortiz’s petition, but described it as “improper” because it was “premature.”

The justice department and the NBI on Friday brought a second batch of complaints in the pork barrel scam, this time against 34 people, including eight former members of the House of Representatives.

Among the former congressmen charged with graft in the Office of the Ombudsman was Rufino Biazon, who resigned as head of the Bureau of Customs on Monday after being implicated in the scandal.

The Commission on Audit (COA) had found that Biazon, a member of President Aquino’s Liberal Party, was among the House members who approved the funding of nonexistent projects proposed by Napoles’ NGOs from 2007 to 2009.

Biazon said he did not know Napoles, and vowed to clear his name.

Selective

But the Metro Manila chapter of the labor group Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP) on Tuesday criticized the filing of charges against Biazon as “selective,” saying President Aquino had many allies whom the COA had found involved in the misuse of the PDAF.

Gie Relova, BMP secretary general for Metro Manila, also criticized De Lima for saying the pork barrel scam investigation did not consider political affiliation.

“We cannot let De Lima’s temporary amnesia slide,” Relova said. The filing of charges against just one ally of the President was not convincing to the “skeptical and indignant” Filipinos, he said.—With a report from Jerome Aning