De Lima hits collusion between gov’t, drug lords against her

Sen. Leila de Lima on Wednesday said the dismissal of drug trafficking charges against high-profile narcotics dealers by the Department of Justice  showed she was not guilty of similar charges the DOJ had brought against her.

One of her lawyers, Alexander Padilla, said the DOJ’s exculpation of the drug lords was part of a “deal” to convince some of them to testify against her.

Padilla noted that two of the government’s witnesses against De Lima—confessed drug dealer Kerwin Espinosa and convicted drug lord Peter Co — were among those cleared by the DOJ of drug trafficking charges brought by the police.

“This is evidence of obvious collusion between the government against the senator. This is part of their design against her,” Padilla said in a phone interview with the Inquirer.

‘Fake’ crackdown

De Lima, who has been detained in a police jail for more than a year while waiting to be tried in three separate drug cases, said in a statement that the exoneration of Espinosa, Co and several others showed President Duterte’s crackdown on narcotics was “fake.”

A panel of DOJ prosecutors  cleared Espinosa, Co, Peter Lim — a wedding compadre of President Rodrigo Duterte — Lovely Impal, Max Miro, Ruel Malindangan, Jun Pepito and several others known only by their aliases of drug trading charges brought by the Philippine National Police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) last December, but kept the resolution from the media.

Reporters discovered the resolution on Monday, leading to the publication of the panel’s findings, which angered senators to whom Espinosa admitted during an inquiry into the narcotics trade in 2016 that he was a drug dealer.

Espinosa also claimed during the inquiry that he gave protection money to De Lima when she was the justice secretary and that he had given her P8 million since 2015 through her former driver and lover Ronnie Dayan.

Punishment

Co said in a sworn statement that De Lima had demanded protection money from him and other imprisoned drug dealers in exchange for allowing them to continue running their illegal drug businesses at the national penitentiary in Muntinlupa City.

De Lima denied accepting money from the drug dealers and accused the Duterte administration of manufacturing the charges to punish her for investigating alleged extrajudicial killings in President Duterte’s brutal war on drugs and the vigilante-style killings of suspected criminals in Davao during Mr. Duterte’s long rule in that city as mayor.

In another statement, De Lima said the dismissal of the charges against Espinosa and the others showed the DOJ and the PNP had failed to bring “real drug lords” to court but had no problem in filing “fake drug cases against political opponents of the Duterte administration like me.”