THE Sandiganbayan on Thursday allowed former President and incumbent Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to leave Veterans Memorial Medical Center and undergo a series of medical examinations at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City next week.
The prosecution panel did not oppose Arroyo’s plea, prodding the anti-graft court’s First Division to grant her request for “humanitarian consideration.”
Arroyo has been allowed to see her doctors at St. Luke’s on Oct. 21 and Oct. 22 after she told the court that she needs to undergo several medical tests, including a nerve conduction velocity test, due to numbness on her left arm and weakness of her grip, which may have been caused by her cervical spine problems.
Earlier, Arroyo’s lawyer Lorenzo Gadon said Arroyo had been suffering persistent and severe pain in her arm “almost the whole day.”
He said Arroyo must be granted house arrest either in Lubao, Pampanga or at La Vista, Quezon City because of her deteriorating health, “a life-threatening one because her illness is not like a heart attack, but her pain in the neck causes other pains in the [entire]body since it is a nerve-related illness.”
Arroyo has been under hospital arrest at the VMMC in Quezon City since October 2012 for plunder and graft charges she is facing before the Sandiganbayan’s First Division.
She was accused of misuse of P366 million in confidential and intelligence funds of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.
But legal expert Antonio Abad Jr., former dean of Far Eastern University’s Institute of Law and Adamson University’s College of Law, questioned the alleged commission of conspiracy with the PCSO officials in the release of the P366-million funds.
“If plunder is a conspiracy, then the act of one is the act of all,” he said.
But the anti-graft court earlier granted the respective motions for demurrer filed by the former PCSO board members – co-accused Manuel Morato, Raymundo Roquero and Jose Taruc V in the plunder suit – and even allowed them to post bail for their provisional liberty.
Arroyo through her son Mikey Arroyo filed her certificate of candidacy for a reelection in the May 2016 congressional race in Pampanga’s second district.
