MANILA
The current scandal here involving the serial theft of the people’s money allocated as pork barrel of members of the Congress confirms once and for all how deep corruption is in the Philippines.
It’s been exposed in media that P10 billion in congressional pork barrel has been stolen through ghost projects and beneficiaries over a span of a decade. The alleged mastermind of the grand theft is someone called Janet Lim Napoles, whose children have now been exposed as living la dolce vita in the Philippines and the United States. Napoles was a fugitive for a while but is now in police custody, having surrendered directly to President Benigno Aquino III.
Now, the long quest for definite answers about how much was really stolen, who among the members of Congress were in cahoots with Napoles, and who else among the supposed recipients of pork barrel money in the grassroots were in connivance, begins. Napoles’s trial is expected to take a long time. Given the snail’s pace of justice here and the presence of some corrupt prosecutors and judges, this whole mess will surely take some interesting and probably befuddling turns.
Napoles’s alleged scheme — or scam — is very simple. She and her accomplices would dream up a project intended to benefit local areas and the people there that looks viable on paper, make up a non-governmental organization that exists on paper only, and then sell the idea to a congressman or senator who would then provide the funding to be taken out of the legislator’s pork barrel. The Filipinos copied the concept of a pork barrel from the US Congress (although, in fairness, the US practice may not be as fraught with corruption as the Philippine version).
The legislator involved is either in cahoots with Napoles in pocketing the allocated funds or he or she may be totally in the dark about the scam. It isn’t hard to surmise that those who will be tagged as having provided funding for ghost projects will use the latter excuse as their defense, that they thought they were helping to finance real projects and didn’t know that the whole operation was a sham. Already, some of the legislators who’ve been tagged as sources of pork barrel funding in this alleged scam have made initial noises that they provided funds in good faith and never knew that the whole scheme was a big swindle. Most Filipinos will be skeptical and we will have to see how convincing the legislators involved will be with their alibis.
What the exposed scam proves at this point is the extent of corruption in the Philippines and how creative the scammers are. Filipino swindlers are very imaginative (even though the alleged Napoles scam is very simple in its concept). What’s worse is that the Napoles scam can’t be the only one in operation here. There must be others in the same business of stealing the people’s money through similar modus operandi. Napoles must just be the tip of the iceberg.
Napoles has claimed that her life is in danger and she’s under heavy security at a training facility of the national police outside Manila.
What this means in turn is that a lot of people must have been involved in Napoles’s operation, possibly ranging from senators and congressmen to provincial governors, town mayors and a lot of other people along the food chain. Fearing exposure as being in cahoots with Napoles, any one of those involved would want to do Napoles in.
More and more, news about the lavish lifestyle of the Napoles family is coming out in the open. They’re supposed to have some 50 posh houses and condos, dozens of flashy vehicles, and have hosted opulent parties. Bundles of cash coming in from their operations are supposedly dumped in bathtubs in the Napoles residences for counting.
A Napoles daughter who resides in the United States has been shown to be living an extravagant life, hobnobbing with the glitterati and owning fabulous cars, condos and an extensive designer wardrobe. She now regrets posting photos of her extravagances on Facebook.
President Aquino has ordered an exhaustive investigation and has promised to send to jail all those involved, even politicians allied with him. This whole thing could explode to high heavens, possibly involving a large number of prominent and powerful politicians and private citizens. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the whole Philippine political community is in peril of disintegration and puts many big political names on the precipice of destruction and ignominy.
But this will only happen if the judicial authorities will do their job. The Philippine justice system is notorious for being corrupt in many areas. It’s a system that often protects the powerful and influential. Often bribe money is able to quash criminal cases and allows the guilty to go scot-free. A former member of Napoles’s office has been reported as saying that Napoles herself expects to beat the raps to be thrown at her in four years, intimating that she has enough connections in the “right” places to thwart justice.
Which makes President Aquino a key player in the scandal. Here in the Philippines, the president can make or break legal cases, depending on his or her resolve in getting at the bottom of things. And whether he or she is serious about making sure that justice is served. In cases like the alleged Napoles scam, the police and the prosecutors move with dispatch and purpose depending on how they perceive the intentions of the country’s leader.
Mr. Aquino has been assiduous in reforming the country’s political system and its bureaucracy, with commendable results so far. Enough for domestic and foreign observers and potential investors to regain confidence in the way things are done here. He has made it his mission as president to leave a reformed government and country when he steps down in 2016.
If the president is serious about sending Napoles and the legislators involved in the scam to jail, it would be a breakthrough in the Philippine justice system. But that’s a big “if” because not all in the prosecutorial and judicial sectors can be relied upon to turn the screws against the guilty in this case. And, many people along the route to justice are susceptible to the enticement of bribe money.
In the end, the Napoles scandal will be a test case of how effective President Aquino will be in bringing to justice the guilty by putting together a crack team of prosecutors in building the cases against an expected large number of participants in the alleged scam and ensuring that the courts will dispense justice where it is demanded and appropriate.
Will the Napoles case be ultimately an example of justice served here or will it be just another case of a trial that goes nowhere with no one punished? It wouldn’t be a surprise to many if the latter happens in the end. But, the nation hopes, this time it will be different and the guilty will indeed be put in jail where they belong.
Again, the key figure in all this will be President Aquino. It’s a heavy burden, but he’s the guy in charge. It’s his job to send the guilty to prison.
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