SENATOR Francis Escudero on Thursday claimed that one of the complainants who filed a disqualification case against his running mate Senator Grace Poe has links to Liberal Party standard bearer Mar Roxas.
Escudero said lawyer Estrella Elamparo, a former counsel of the Government Service and Insurance System, is a senior partner of Divina Law, the law firm that former defense secretary Avelino Cruz used in suing his former partner F. Arthur Villaraza.
“Nonong Cruz is of course with Mar,” Escudero said, adding that Cruz was an adviser of Roxas when he ran for vice president in 2010. Cruz also served as lawyer of Roxas when he filed an election protest against Binay following the 2010 elections.
Elamparo, on the other hand, is a complainant in one of the four disqualification cases filed against Poe and the second division of the Commission on Elections was ruling on her complaint when they disqualified Poe on Tuesday.
Escudero said he was also “astonished” at the zeal of Elamparo in seeking the removal of Poe’s name from the Comelec’s official ballot when Poe still had several legal remedies to pursue before her case is deemed final and executory.
“Perhaps she is simply trying to gain publicity or attention for her cause, given that, as a lawyer, she should know that the relief she is asking for is not in accordance with the law and rules of the Comelec,” Escudero said.
But Senate President Franklin Drilon denied that Elamparo was connected with the Liberal Party which is endorsing Roxas’ presidential bid.
“No, not at all. I don’t know her and she is not connected [to LP], just to be clear,” said Drilon who, like Cruz, is known to have been one of the closest advisers of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, whom they both later abandoned.
Poe herself did not want to linger on her claim that the disqualification cases against her were allegedly being engineered by her opponents Roxas and Vice President Jejomar Binay, but stressed that she would fight to the end.
“Afraid I am not. Not when the people are behind me,” Poe told reporters on Thursday after the Senate Electoral Tribunal affirmed its dismissal of the disqualification case filed by Rizalito David.
“I fight for their right to choose their president, a President who can lead this nation out of its political and moral decay and lift the economic doldrums slowly creeping up on us,” she said.
She said the fight is not hers alone. “This fight is ours – you and I. It is our fight to change the path that we will cross and the history of our country so that we can finally obtain the peaceful life promised from the past.”
“This is our fight against shenanigans in and out of government. This is our fight against the ills of the soceity that pervade our land, poison our youth and distort our morals and national character,” Poe added.
In an interview with the media, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, one of the three SET members from the judiciary, said he and the two justices who also voted for Poe’s disqualificafion will inhibit when the case reaches the Supreme Court.
“We have to inhibit. We cannot review our own decision,” said Carpio, whom Poe also accused of allegedly being a creature of Roxas through Cruz, who was his former law firm partner.