Massive Corruption and Bad Governance under the Duterte Administration - 8th in Series

BAD GOVERNANCE UNDER THE DUTERTE ADMINISTRATION

DERELICTION OF DUTY

Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:09 AM March 18, 2020

…In August, September, and October last year, the government’s lawyer lost three consecutive Marcos ill-gotten wealth cases for the same reason: violating the “best evidence rule” of court by presenting only photocopies and not the original documents in the court inquiry.

The latest setback is the Jan. 23 Sandiganbayan resolution, released in early March, which denied the Office of the Solicitor General’s (OSG) bid to reverse the 2019 antigraft court decision to dismiss a P267-million forfeiture case against dictator Ferdinand Marcos, former first lady Imelda Marcos, and their cronies for insufficiency of evidence.

So dismal and sloppy is the OSG’s record in pursuing the Marcos cases that the Sandiganbayan Fourth Division called it out last week, ordering Solicitor General Jose Calida to inform the court of the agency’s “proper legal action” in one of the civil cases against the Marcos couple.

The case, filed before the antigraft court more than 20 years ago in 1997, involves 20 private individuals who allegedly held 3,305 shares of stock for the Marcoses in Eastern Telecommunications. The court noted that the case had remained stagnant for more than a year, with the OSG filing a motion to suspend the preliminary conference on Sept. 24, 2018, its last action on the case.

As if that were not enough proof of its incompetence, the OSG also missed a recent court-appointed deadline to comment on the appeal lodged by a defendant in another Marcos case involving a beach property in Cavite allegedly held by cronies and dummies.

The OSG’s comment was submitted only on Feb. 20, about a week after the deadline. The agency claimed it received the Jan. 10 court order belatedly since a secretary had allegedly included it in another case file.

But records showed that at the time the OSG should have been working on the Marcos case, it was busy filing petitions to the high court on the ABS-CBN case.

…Such a record of bumbling through court rules, which should be all-too-familiar ground by now for government lawyers after 30 years of legal jousting on these cases, raises a disturbing question: Is the anemic and ineffectual effort to pursue the Marcos ill-gotten cases deliberate? Whose interest has the Calida-era OSG been serving all this time?

…Those who know the political ties that bind Calida to the Marcoses and the Marcoses to President Duterte would find this arrangement suspiciously convenient for the Marcoses.

…can the public expect unalloyed loyalty to duty from the OSG? And does Calida think the public will overlook his shoddy work…?

…His office’s string of dismal losses and suspicious missteps in the Marcos cases, expressly called out by the Sandiganbayan, may very well constitute dereliction of duty.

Read more: https://opinion.inquirer.net/128160/dereliction-of-duty#ixzz6Hwy8frBx

Degrading the rule of law, abusing power thereby, and abetting corruption probably represent the worst sins of the Duterte administration against good governance.

It would be ridiculous to claim that a lawyer as clever—or should we say, wily and cunning—as Calida had inadvertently made the mistake of submitting photocopied documents as evidence. The explanation—obviously—for this lapse is that it is deliberate. The beneficiary—in spades, to the tune of hundreds of millions of pesos—of this crude ploy is the Marcos family.

Rule of law entails the consistent application of laws, guided by universal principles of human rights—vis-à-vis the preferential treatment of persons in positions of power and wealth—in an accessible, efficient, impartial, and consistent manner.

Therefore, when the Solicitor-General fails to fulfill his duty to safeguard, uphold, and apply the law in an impartial and consistent manner, so that by premeditated negligence he delivers from the prospect of conviction his political associates who in the past have been found guilty—de jure and de facto—of plunder many times over, he directly attacks the rule of law and degrades it.

The effect in these cases exonerating the Marcos family is to condone plunder and naturally, to encourage it as well. By liberating the defendants through the deliberate sabotage of the evidence—by submitting evidence that guarantees the dismissal of the cases—the Solicitor General and the Philippine government his employer are broadcasting a message perverse, loud, and clear to the Philippine people, to cite the words of Peter Wallace, “If you’re going to steal, steal big.”