WHEN Benigno Aquino III stepped down last month as the most vindictive president in recent memory, we were hopeful that the culture of political persecution that he engendered would finally come to a well-deserved end.
But Aquino’s faithful attack dog, Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales, seems hell-bent on keeping that culture alive, even into a new administration.
Shortly after the Supreme Court voted 11-4 to throw out her plunder case against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Morales publicly disagreed with the justices who found that she had been unable to furnish enough evidence of Mrs. Arroyo’s guilt.
In that case, filed in 2012, the Ombudsman alleged that Mrs. Arroyo and other officials of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office had conspired to acquire ill-gotten wealth worth P366 million by misappropriating intelligence funds from the agency.
But the majority decision of the Supreme Court observed that the state failed to establish a clear conspiracy among the co-accused, and could not show by any evidence that Mrs. Arroyo or her co-accused had personally benefited from the alleged misappropriated funds.
In brief, over almost four years while Mrs. Arroyo was stripped of her liberty and languished under hospital detention, the Ombudsman failed to produce a shred of evidence to show that the former president received a single centavo from the P366 million she was supposed to have stolen.
Worse, during this time, Mrs. Arroyo’s co-accused were able to post bail, while the anti-graft court refused to grant the former president the same right. This triggered accusations that her detention was politically motivated, and even drew condemnation from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which described Mrs. Arroyo’s incarceration as arbitrary, illegal and violative of international law.
Notwithstanding this, the Ombudsman would probably agree with dissenting Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno that personal benefit need not be proven, and that all the state needed to show was that Mrs. Arroyo had P50 million in her assets—the minimum amount required to be considered plunder.
The notion seems illogical, however, for failing to acknowledge that the P50 million could have come from any number of other, legitimate sources, and assumes guilt rather than proves it.
Now, Morales says she will file a motion for reconsideration and investigate Mrs. Arroyo for the same offense—but for years earlier than 2008.
In so doing, the Ombudsman is clearly showing her weak hand, reaching further into the past after her first case collapsed, in a vain effort to throw Mrs. Arroyo back into a detention that has been condemned as illegal.
The move reeks of political vendetta. Certainly, the Office of the Ombudsman has better things to do with the people’s money than to mount yet another futile chase of a former president’s political nemesis.