Fore!
Many tales have been told and retold about megabuck deals hatched and struck on the fairways. In the four to six hours that golfers in the same flight are stuck together, they run out any new thing to say about the weather. They are all by themselves in the middle of the course. Nobody is eavesdropping. So there’s the perfect opportunity to talk business.But if we are to believe Comelec Chairman Benjamin Abalos, he and officials of ZTE Corp. not for once talked about the latter’s $330 million national broadband project. Not at Wack Wack when Abalos was hosting; not at Shenzhen in China when the ZTE officials were reciprocating.
Abalos, reacting to a privilege speech of Rep. Carlos Padilla where he was tagged as having brokered the deal, said his only role was to introduce ZTE officials to Finance Secretary Margarito Teves. He did not talk to Gloria Arroyo or to Transportation and Communications Secretary Leandro Mendoza, the Cabinet man who is now on top of the broadband project. For making the introduction, Abalos said, he deserves the gratitude of the nation, not accusations of lining his pocket thick with "commissions" from his Chinese golfing buddies.
Without jumping to any conclusion, we have news for Abalos. Expecting gratitude from the people for what he did is at a par with wishing before May that he expected to leave as legacy a record of clean elections.
The ZTE deal is alleged to be overpriced. The government says it isn’t. Critics do not accept the government’s claim on its mere say-so. They demand that the agreement be made public. The government says the original document was stolen. It has since been reconstructed, but the government to this day refuses to make public the terms of a contract that will cost taxpayers P14 billion and change.
Abalos could well be innocent of Padilla’s allegations. But his stint at the Comelec has been marred by so many anomalies people will always believe the worst of him.
Remember the P1.3 billion election automation project? Or the "Hello Garci" scandal? Or, closer to the present, the farcical elections last May in ARMM?
Any of these scandals would have prompted a man with "delicadeza" to resign. In the case of Abalos, his reaction to all these scandals was to dare his critics to file a case against him if there was any evidence of wrongdoing.
At least, Gloria Arroyo said "I’m sorry" at the height of the "Hello Garci" scandal.
Not in his worst nightmare would Abalos probably see himself being compared with Arroyo. And Gloria ending up better in comparison to him.
