Purge or whitewash?
Corrupt officials crowd the corridors of power, but Malacañang is reluctant to send them to jail or even to just let them go. The Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC) found sufficient evidence of graft and corruption against 92 presidential appointees over the last few years, but the really big cases seem to be gathering dust in the Office of the President (OP). The PAGC serves as the investigation arm of Malacañang in graft cases involving presidential appointees, but it is the OP that decides whether to suspend or dismiss erring officials and endorse the filing of charges against them to the Office of the Ombudsman.Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said the OP had disposed of all but 35 of those cases, with four of the remaining cases involving members of the Cabinet, and had until the middle of September to act on them. The two most recent OP decisions saw the dismissal of the chair of the National Labor Relations Commission for allegedly extorting P200,000 from the owner of a recruitment agency and the firing of the head of the Intramuros Administration for allegedly failing to liquidate P2.2 million in cash advances to cover the expenses for the eviction of squatters and cutting by half his agency’s share of parking fees estimated to reach almost P6 million annually.
Curiously for an administration that is not exactly publicity shy, few people, if any, seem to have heard about the dozens of graft cases that Malacañang has reviewed and acted upon, except for these two cases. And even then, these are far from earthshaking in an era of multimillion-peso scandals, when even minor functionaries at the Bureau of Customs or the Bureau of Internal Revenue have been found to own houses in posh villages and fleets of expensive cars and to travel abroad as often as senators and congressmen. It’s either that the OP has been conducting a quiet purge of penny-ante grafters or it has been operating a giant whitewashing machine that puts all the PAGC’s efforts to waste.
Suspecting that the OP is stonewalling the really big cases, several lawyers in the PAGC are said to be thinking of resigning. What is especially frustrating for them is the OP’s inaction on cases involving heads of government corporations, who are said to be close to First Gentleman Mike Arroyo.
But maybe these lawyers are getting carried away by their idealism. The cynics would be quick to point out that to this day no case has been filed against another close friend of Mr. Arroyo, former Agriculture Undersecretary Jocelyn Bolante, who could not account for some P728 million in fertilizer funds. The Senate has investigated the case and the Commission on Audit has concluded that the money was indeed misused. However, despite all the documentary evidence provided by the Senate, the Office of the Ombudsman still has not brought formal charges against Bolante, who has skipped to the United States in the meantime. So what makes the PAGC lawyers think that the cases they have built against officials with powerful connections would fare any better and get anywhere?
The PAGC was reportedly endowed with a P1-billion grant from the United States and allocated the same amount by the Philippine government. If the most that it is permitted to do is pin down officials who extort P200,000 or fail to account for a couple of millions in government funds, it might as well be dismantled. There’s no sense in throwing away billions to catch officials who steal a couple of million pesos. The PAGC should not be used as a show window for a cleanup that is really intended to sweep the dirtiest scams under the rug.
