When cornered, blame Marcos. That seems to be the game plan of Vice President Leni Robredo and her Liberal Party right now.
The lawyer of Robredo, former Akbayan congressman and LP spokesman Ibarra Gutierrez, said in an interview yesterday that the fact that lawyer Oliver Lozano, who is identified with the Marcos family, submitted the first impeachment complaint against Robredo is “worrisome.” Gutierrez hinted that former Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr.—who is protesting Robredo’s victory in the elections last May—may be behind the move to impeach Robredo.
The theory is so silly, it must be dismissed out of hand.
First of all, Lozano, who gained notoriety during the Arroyo administration for filing impeachment complaints annually in order to “inoculate” the President from further charges for a year, is probably just chasing what he thinks is a huge money-making ambulance for him. Even his hastily filed complaint has not been officially received yet, since Congress is on recess and cannot act on it.
Lozano’s complaint was merely brought to the office of House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and doesn’t even have a congressman to sponsor it, as the rules require. (This is why Magdalo Rep. Gary Alejano’s earlier complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte was filed on the last session day, when it could be received, with Alejano himself as the sponsor.)
Second, the real complaint that will be filed against Robredo, based mainly on her ill-advised video message played back at a United Nations-sponsored conference in Vienna, Austria last week, will only be revealed in a press conference tomorrow. This complaint was drafted by a team of lawyers acting as private citizens who decided to do something about Robredo’s speech shortly after it was posted on the video-sharing site YouTube.
I’ve been told that Alvarez himself is planning to endorse this—not Lozano’s—complaint. And Marcos or any member of his family certainly have nothing to do with it.
But that’s just how the LP has always operated. The remnants of the Yellow regime cannot seem to accept that the people have turned their backs on them and that they will retaliate against anyone who unjustly attacks Duterte.
Marcos isn’t even going to succeed Robredo if she is removed, since he is not even a member of the present Congress. As far as I know—and I personally know some of the lawyers who drafted the real complaint—none of them are even remotely associated with the Marcoses.
What’s truly worrisome is the quality of legal help that Robredo is getting. If her lawyers think this is about Marcos, she’s definitely going to lose her case.
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For years, I routinely castigated Sonny Coloma for not having a clue when he worked as head of the Aquino media team. But I was talking about his abilities as a government propagandist, not as the administrator of state facilities.
Workers at the APO Production Unit, a government printing facility, are up in arms over what they say is an overpriced, grossly disadvantageous deal giving the printing of e-passports to a private-sector outfit through a joint venture scheme. The outsourcing deal, crafted in 2015, gave the lion’s share of the revenues to a private company called United Graphic Expression Corp., after the job of printing passports was removed from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
The deal is no small potatoes. Industry sources placed the cost of a single blank passport at P200, while the microchip needed for the security features costs only P100. Add the cost of security ink and thread used for binding the passport and P400 sounds like a fair price.
The Department of Foreign Affairs receives at least 17,000 passport applications a day and processes an estimated 5.1 million applications per year. With passports costing P950 each, the DFA earns about P500 for every passport released.
Under its 10-year contract with UGEC, APO-PU stands to receive an estimated P25.5 billion. Except that under the deal, the government agency will only earn a tenth of that amount, with the private partner getting 90 percent in the lopsided sharing scheme.
The deal was entered into by Presidential Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma on the part of the government, after the BSP said it wanted to let go of the passport printing job in order to focus on printing currency. Little did anyone know at the time that Coloma and his private partner may as well be printing money through the lucrative—and onerous, for the public—contract.
I’ve been told that right now, on the basis of the employees’ revelations, the Commission on Audit is going over the APO-PU’s books with a fine-toothed comb. Thus far, CoA has reportedly discovered questionable disbursements, including huge commissions and consultancy fees paid to several unnamed personalities.
And here I was, believing that Coloma, as one of the three Cabinet members in charge of President Noynoy Aquino, didn’t know what he was doing on the job. I can’t believe Coloma wasn’t aware that he was going into a deal that would oppress the millions of Filipinos who needed to get travel documents, especially those who were looking for jobs overseas.