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Philippines
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Mar’s desperate times

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The Philippines chalked up another dubious record this week, landing 19th in the world in illicit financial flows, also known as “dirty money.” A report of the US-based non-profit Global Financial Integrity said smuggling was the reason why the Philippines recorded an average of $9.03 billion in dirty money flows annually from 2003 to 2013, or a total of $93.494 for the same 10-year period.

Two things can be gleaned from this shameful citation. First, smuggling remains a huge problem in the Philippines and second, the local Anti-Money Laundering Council is probably not doing its job of stopping illicit financial flows, the very reason for its existence.

It’s significant that GFI advised countries in its dirty money list to implement anti-money laundering laws already in place, like the one that created AMLC. Also, the group urged all countries to heed the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, the Paris-based international group formed primarily to curb terrorist funding and the laundering of drug syndicate money through the international banking system. 

The sad truth is, AMLC has become just another a political tool for the Aquino administration in its campaign to destroy its perceived political enemies. The great power of AMLC was first used (misused, really) in the successful Malacañang-sponsored plot to remove Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2012; it was also very much in display in the more recent attempt to freeze the assets in 242 bank accounts said to be owned or controlled by Vice President Jejomar Binay, the better to portray him as corrupt.

But of all the accounts linked to Binay and people associated with him, AMLC was only ultimately able to identify one, containing P1.7 million, as a target for a freeze order. And AMLC failed to convince a Manila court that the account needed to be frozen, despite an offer from Binay himself not to touch the funds there until AMLC clears up its true ownership and provenance.

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Binay has also sued AMLC, which is headed by Bangko Sentral Governor Amando Tetangco and run by a certain Julia Abad, for harassing him. And the vice president’s people have a valid point when they say that no one ever hears from AMLC except when the Aquino administration has a political enemy that it wants to take down.

Meanwhile, the GFI report shows that AMLC has failed to stop the flood of dirty money from smuggling, to say nothing of funding for terrorist organizations and drug syndicates. But for partisan political operations, AMLC has done a superb job—and will probably be performing that function for many years to come, now that this administration has shown how to “properly” use it.

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But tying up political opponents in litigation has really been elevated to a high art by President Noynoy Aquino’s chosen successor, the cellar-dwelling Mar Roxas. Binay is only the first target of the litigious Roxas, who keeps denying that he is involved in the legal troubles faced by his opponents—even if no one believes him.

The supporters of Senator Grace Poe are so convinced that Roxas is out to get their candidate through legal machinations that they have already warned Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, the latest darling of the pre-election surveys, that he will also join the list of those targeted for liquidation through this “gaming” of the legal system. And the only real thing that Binay, Poe and Duterte have in common is that they all seem unbeatable as far as the candidate of “daang matuwid” is concerned.

Supporters of all these three candidates have long identified prominent lawyer Avelino “Nonong” Cruz as the architect of the strategy to tie up Roxas’ rivals in court, with a view to disqualifying them from running, putting them in jail or just to smear them in the hopes of taking them down a few notches in the surveys. Like Santa’s elves, lawyers in Roxas’ camp toil endlessly to find legal weaknesses in all the other candidates, who will then be sued by friendly “outsourced” counsel in order to cover their tracks.

This was supposedly the scheme employed to disqualify Poe on residency and/or citizenship grounds, according to Senator Francis Escudero. The lawyer who filed a complaint against Poe, Estrella Elamparo, the senator said, is with the Divina law firm—the same one used by Cruz in the case he filed against his former partners in “The Firm” after its acrimonious breakup.

The three members of the second division of the Commission on Elections that ruled recently against Poe, Escudero said, all have ties with Cruz’ law firm or the Aquino administration. Even Chairman Andres Bautista himself has been accused of being in on a plot to eliminate Poe, supposedly because of his own ties to the present government and Roxas.

The strategy seems to be, for the perennially trailing Roxas, if you can’t beat them, sue them. And if they can’t be disqualified or jailed, maybe they’ll lose some of their survey numbers, which will then go to Roxas.

But the strategy is so full of holes, it might as well be a sieve. As leading budget and political analyst Professor Benjamin Diokno has as pointed out, Roxas is actually the only pro-administration candidate; all the others can thus be classified as anti-administration.

“If Roxas’ survey numbers represent the pro-administration votes and the combined numbers of his opponents represent the anti-administration votes, you’ll see how difficult Roxas’ situation is,” Diokno said. As the old joke says, if Roxas runs unopposed, unopposed will probably beat him, too.

So I guess you can’t really ask Roxas not to use every means possible to win—even if that means he can only win by making sure the rest of the field doesn’t even get out of the starting gate.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And Roxas looks pretty desperate to me.

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