THE camp of Vice President Jejomar Binay on Friday challenged the Ombudsman to file charges against Liberal Party standard bearer Manuel Roxas II who was linked by former MRT3 general manager Al Vitangcol to an anomalous MRT contract.
Binay’s spokesman Rico Quicho said the Ombudsman’s charges against the Binays were politically motivated and part of the Aquino administration’s black propaganda against them.
“The revelations made by former MRT general manager Vitangcol the other day exposes the Ombudsman’s predisposition to look the other way when administration and LP personalities, in this case no less than Mr. Mar Roxas, are involved,” Quicho said.
“We look forward to facing these frivolous charges [against the Binays]in a fair and impartial court.”
Mon Ilagan, another Binay spokesman, said Binay had vowed to streamline the process of releasing calamity funds to ensure that help would reach victims on time unlike the teka-teka approach of Roxas in which millions of pesos worth of calamity assistance did not reach the beneficiaries while food rotted in warehouses.
Roxas was the Interior secretary when Super Typhoon “Yolanda” struck the Visayas and killed 8,000 people.
Ilagan said the thousands of typhoon victims continued to suffer because local government units were ill prepared for emergencies.
Quicho said the filing of the case against dismissed Makati Mayor Junjun Binay before the Sandiganbayan was simply a procedural consequence of the erroneous and biased resolutions of the Ombudsman.
“The bias and partiality of the Ombudsman is beyond dispute. It has played loose with the law and the Constitution in persecuting the Vice President and his family and those in the opposition,” Quicho said.
Earlier, Vitangcol tagged Roxas in the allegedly anomalous $12-million maintenance service contract deal for the mass transit system.
Vitangcol filed an affidavit before the Supreme Court to support his motion for reconsideration. He challenged the Ombudsman’s decision to file graft charges against him over the awarding of the MRT3 interim maintenance contract without public bidding in 2012.
In his affidavit, Vitangcol accused Roxas, who was then Transport secretary, and his successor and party mate Joseph Emilio Abaya of deliberately ignoring the procurement requests for MRT3.
