Sara impeachment trial is a dud

ARGUE the legalities as much as you can, but after more than a month of hearings, the unmistakable impression is that the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte has been a dud. Watch it as I have, and there’s no other description: Boring as Atty. Lorna Kapunan’s asking questions to an auditor.

The Filipino word “pilit” is also an apt description of it: being forced beyond rationality. As such, the real reason why so much of the Congress’ time and resources have been devoted to it becomes crystal clear: To prevent Sara from running for office in 2028.

That it is a flop becomes so obvious if one were to compare it to the trial of President Joseph Estrada 25 years ago, in which actual witnesses testified — not bureaucrats testifying on glorified hearsays put in reports.

The Estrada trial gripped the nation. Offices and homes had their television sets tuned to the Senate. Filipinos who had never before heard the term “impeachment court” suddenly knew the names of prosecutors, defense lawyers and senator-judges, and testimony in the afternoon became the country’s conversation at dinner.

The reason wasn’t simply that Estrada was president rather than vice president. His prosecutors produced witnesses whose accusations were dramatic, direct and understandable to anybody, without needing to explain COA circulars, liquidation procedures or government accounting rules. They had witnesses saying, in effect: I was there, I witnessed Estrada’s corruption.

Former Ilocos Sur governor Luis “Chavit” Singson, Estrada’s longtime friend and political ally, didn’t appear before the Senate to interpret an audit report. He claimed that he himself participated in collecting jueteng protection money and delivering Estrada’s share himself, and he brought records detailing the alleged collections and payments. The significance required no accountant or lawyer to explain: Here was one of the president’s closest political allies telling the country, in effect, that he handled the payoff money and gave him his share.

Trail

Singson’s aide Emma Lim provided another flesh-and-blood link in the alleged money trail. She testified that she carried a bag containing P5 million in jueteng proceeds to Malacañang and left it with Estrada’s personal secretary.

Then came perhaps the most devastating witness of the trial, Clarissa Ocampo, senior vice president of Equitable PCI Bank. Ocampo testified that she was sitting barely one foot away from Estrada when she watched him sign “Jose Velarde” on bank documents involving a P500-million investment agreement — testimony the Supreme Court subsequently recounted in essentially those terms.

Think of the impact on television viewers. This wasn’t an auditor saying supporting documents were inadequate, or a banker saying a withdrawal was unusual, or the NBI director Melvin Matibag reading his subordinates’ reports made half a year before he was appointed to the post. It was a senior bank executive pointing to the president of the Philippines and saying she sat across the desk from him and watched him sign another man’s name. “Jose Velarde” ceased to be an abstraction; Ocampo created an unforgettable scene in the public mind.

There were other bombshells. Prosecutors produced a P142-million check bearing the Velarde signature that they linked to the purchase of a mansion for one of Estrada’s mistresses. Bank officials testified about secret accounts and enormous movements of money. Former finance secretary Edgardo Espiritu testified about Estrada’s alleged involvement with businessman Dante Tan and BW Resources that manipulated the stock market.

Now compare those witnesses and their testimonies with those presented so far against Sara Duterte. The difference is startling.

Funds

The prosecution’s witnesses on Duterte’s alleged misuse of P612.5 million in confidential funds included former LandBank branch managers Violeta Constantino and Nenita Camposano, who testified about large cash withdrawals made by the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education and characterized the transactions as unusual.

Interesting, certainly, but neither testified that Sara Duterte received the money. Neither said she saw Duterte pocket it, and neither said Duterte instructed her to divert government money into a private account. What the bankers established was essentially that large amounts of government money were withdrawn. Constantino described P125 million withdrawn for the OVP as being placed in three or four large bags — dramatic, until one remembers that the person encashing the checks was OVP special disbursing officer Gina Acosta, not Sara.

After the bank tellers came the auditors. Former Commission on Audit bureaucrat Roderick Wamil testified about deficiencies in the liquidation of more than P200 million in confidential funds. The hearings have dealt with supporting documents, acknowledgment receipts, invoices, liquidation requirements and whether expenditures complied with government auditing rules — potentially important evidence, but Wamil was no Chavit Singson. He didn’t testify that Sara handed him stolen money or that he handed over stolen money to her; he was an auditor explaining government records.

To call these individuals “witnesses” is a misnomer; none of them witnessed an alleged Sara act of corruption. They are merely resource persons testifying to the authenticity of bank documents, COA reports, NBI investigation reports — absolutely none of which pointed to crime.

The prosecution has since moved deeper into the confidential-funds bureaucracy, calling COA personnel and seeking testimony from the OVP and DepEd special disbursing officers, the people much closer to the actual handling of the money. These witnesses could prove to be far more important. If one of Duterte’s former disbursing officers testifies that the vice president personally ordered money diverted to fictitious beneficiaries, instructed subordinates to manufacture liquidation documents or received part of the money herself, the complexion of this trial would change overnight. But that hasn’t happened yet.

The prosecutors really have displayed such gargantuan ignorance of corruption, here and elsewhere: Never has corruption been proven by government audit reports. This requires witnesses and private documents showing somebody put government funds into their bank accounts.

Singson

So far there has been no Chavit Singson. Nobody has testified that Sara Duterte ordered them to steal the money, that they personally gave her the money, or that they watched her put government money into her own account. And there has certainly been no Clarissa Ocampo moment — no credible independent witness saying, in substance, that they sat across the table and watched the vice president personally execute the fraudulent transaction.

Perhaps because the witnesses themselves have so far produced so little direct testimony against Duterte, some anti-Duterte, pro-Marcos senators tried — hilariously I think — to supply the missing drama themselves. They are supposed to be senator-judges, yet their questioning has sounded remarkably like that of prosecutors attempting to lead witnesses toward conclusions damaging to Duterte, as if politicians by profession suddenly fancy themselves skilled trial lawyers.

Senator-prosecutor Risa Hontiveros provides the most conspicuous example. Again and again, her questioning tends toward the formulation: “Ano ang ipinahihiwatig nito?” She was clueless that that Filipino verb can mean “hint,” “suggest,” “imply” or even “allude to.” Nobody has ever been convicted in a court by being hinted, suggested, implied to have committed a crime.

The phrase is revealing. If a witness possessed direct evidence that Duterte stole money, there would be little need to ask what some document or transaction “implies”; the obvious questions would be whether Sara Duterte ordered the diversion of the money, whether the witness gave it to her, or whether the witness saw her receive it. Instead, the public is frequently taken through a chain of questions asking witnesses to interpret what documents, withdrawals, signatures or missing receipts supposedly signify. But an impeachment conviction should surely rest on what the evidence proves, not merely on what a Duterte-bashing senator says ipinahihiwatig.

There is also something despicable over anti-Duterte senator-prosecutors pretending to be detached judges while conducting prosecutorial-style questioning. An impeachment court is admittedly political by its very nature, and senators have always been permitted to question witnesses, but there is a difference between clarifying testimony and appearing to rescue a prosecution case by eliciting inferences the witnesses themselves haven’t directly supplied.

The contrast with the Estrada trial again is instructive. Chavit Singson didn’t need a senator to ask what his testimony “implied”; he claimed he collected jueteng money and delivered Estrada’s share. Clarissa Ocampo didn’t require a senator to construct an inference from bank records; she said she watched Estrada sign “Jose Velarde.” The testimony spoke for itself.

Eyewitnesses

That is the enormous difference between the two impeachment trials. Against Estrada, prosecutors presented eyewitnesses to the alleged wrongdoing, and the public didn’t need an accountant — much less a senator acting like a prosecutor — to explain why their testimony mattered.

Against Sara, the witnesses so far have mostly established something quite different: government money was released and withdrawn in unusually large amounts, documents were allegedly deficient, liquidation requirements may not have been followed, and questionable names appeared in acknowledgment receipts. Those may eventually become important building blocks of a case, but a pile of building blocks isn’t a house.

The contrast explains much of the ho-hum atmosphere surrounding Sara’s trial. Estrada’s impeachment had Filipinos to visualizing bags of jueteng money entering Malacañang, a president signing a fictitious name on bank documents, a P142-million check, secret accounts containing hundreds of millions and finally a sealed envelope supposedly concealing billions. Sara’s prosecution asks Filipinos to follow COA circulars, acknowledgment receipts, liquidation requirements, cash-withdrawal procedures, bank subpoenas and thousands of pages of government documents — punctuated by senators asking witnesses what all of this supposedly ipinahihiwatig.

Estrada’s trial was a story. Sara’s so far, is a boring audit.

At the end of the day though, as what happened in the impeachment of the late Chief Justice Renato Corona, it will be bribes to senators — as much as P150 million each in pork-barrel type allocations in that case — that will convict Sara, and the trial merely gives the judges a justification for their votes. So far, the trial isn’t giving them such “air-cover.”

*Refer to my columns on the Corona trial, particularly my Sept. 29, 2013 piece, “P559 million released before Senate vote vs Corona.”

(My series on the Indonesian Salim empire in the country will be published every Monday.)

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Sara impeachment trial is a dud
Source: Breaking News PH