A week ago, Janet Lim
Napoles, the Filipino-Chinese businesswoman at the center of the country’s
massive P10 billion Pork Barrel scandal, handed over affidavits to a Blue
Ribbon Senate committee implicating an astonishing 20 members of the Senate and
100 members of the House of Representatives.
That is five sixths of the entire Senate and more than a third of the
House of Representatives in an episode involving venal lawmakers who funneled
government money into their own pockets that was meant to improve the lives of
their constituents in a desperately poor country with a per capita gross
domestic product of US$4,700 in purchasing power parity. The
Philippines ranks 165th in the world out of 267 countries.
The list
of lawmakers includes virtually all of the country’s top politicians, including
Manny Villar, a presidential candidate in the 2010 general election; two
members of the family of former President Joseph Estrada; Ferdinand “Bongbong”
Marcos Jr; Loren Legarda, ranked by the US Embassy as one of the country’s five
most prominent women; three members of the family of former President Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo’ and many more. [The full list can be found here]
The
scandal revolves around the Priority Development Assistance Fund, established
under another name in 1990 during the term of President Corazon Aquino, the
current president’s mother. Its ostensible purpose was to allow lawmakers to
fund small-scale infrastructure or community projects outside the scope of
national projects. It has since become universally known as the Pork Barrel.
Each senator was to receive P200 million (US$4.47 million at current exchange
rates), and each congressman P70 million annually.
Napoles
allegedly established a syndicate of non-government organizations through which
lawmakers could channel their pork barrel funds. The money could then find its
way back into their personal accounts – with a certain amount ending up in
Napoles’ own accounts, making her extremely wealthy. Napoles is said to have
established as many as 20 such NGOs under her JLN Group.
“To the
extent of my knowledge, the following are the Senators, Congressmen and their
agents and the officials or staff of implementing agencies of government that
had connections with me and received part of the pork barrel,” Napoles said in
her affidavit naming them all.
But
Napoles was hardly alone. Between 2010 and 2012, another estimated P500 million
went to fake NGOs through the state-owned Philippine Forest Corp., the office
of Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala and the National Agribusiness Corp, and
ended up in the bank accounts of lawmakers. They have not been named yet.
The
question is what happens next. The cases are before the country’s
Sandiganbayan, a special appellate court made up of 15 jurists to handle
corruption cases that was put in place as a kind of head fake by the late
strongman Ferdinand Marcos in 1978. It is an extraordinarily complex
case, involving 42 corruption charges and three cases of plunder against at
least 30 defendants. It is uncertain if Napoles’ affidavit will bring the
total number to 120.
“According
to investigators, Napoles worked with congress members and senators
individually and the lawmakers did not know the specifics of the illegal
activities of their colleagues,” according to an analysis of the case by
Pacific Strategies & Assessments, a country risk firm headquartered in
Manila. “This is more than a technicality for prosecutors trying to build a
case. It means that rather than addressing pork barrel schemes as a broad
conspiracy with many players, they might have to address each individual scheme
separately. This is vastly more labor intensive than building a single
consolidated large-scale case.”
Unfortunately
the Sandiganbayan is far behind in working its way through anti-corruption
cases. As PSA pointed out, the court took from 1998 to 2014 to convict
two regional government officials of funneling millions of pesos to companies
of their choosing. Unfortunately, after 16 years one of the two was mentally
incapacitated and other had died.
The
anti-corruption court started 2015 with more than 3,000 unresolved cases before
it. The Sandiganbayan resolved only 277 cases in 2014, meaning that “At their
current rate, it would take more than a decade to resolve the present caseload;
much less the additional cases filed each year,” PSA said.
The
ineffectiveness of the government and court system at prosecuting major
corruption figures, as PSA points out, “has a corrosive impact on the country’s
reform efforts. Though the situation is improving, the slow pace of justice
means that the seedy details of lawmakers robbing the poor to line their
pockets will be the narrative in the country, rather than that of an improving
investment climate.”
In
addition to the tedious pace of the march to justice, the issue of impunity in
the Philippines makes the situation worse. The family of Ferdinand
Marcos, the strongman deposed and driven from the country and politics in 1987,
remains firmly fixed in the Congress. Joseph Estrada, driven from the
presidential office in 2001 on charges of massive corruption, served his
time in comfortable house arrest at his own estate until he was pardoned by
former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is now under house arrest on
corruption charges while Estrada has been elected mayor of the city of Manila.
Vice President Jejomar Binay has been under attack in the newspapers for months
for massive corruption that made him extremely wealthy during his service as
mayor of Makati City. According to the country’s polling organizations, the
scandal has hardly dented his popularity.
“One of
the prominent cases for the Philippines being a banana republic [or camote
(sweet potato) republic if you’re feeling cheeky] is our inability to put to
rest the ghosts of our political past,” wrote a blogger who goes under the name
“I write as I write.” “It speaks to the inherent weakness of our political and
judicial structures – weaknesses that were caused by martial law, and
exacerbated by almost every government since. Only in truly third world
countries can murderers, the corrupt and the dregs of humanity rise to some of
the highest offices in the land. And not only be accepted; but honored and
praised as saviors and heroes. Even in the face of incontrovertible proof and
evidence.”
Most of the 120 senators
and congressmen now named in the Pork Barrel scandal will be up for office in
2016. It is unknown how many will go to the voters in lieu of going to jail but
the prognosis is pretty clear. Asia Sentinel
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