Dollar count
Now it has come to this.
In the trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona, as the Senate tries to decide whether or not Corona may keep his position as head of the ultimate legal arbiter in the land, the Supreme Court itself, certain familiar propaganda tactics are resurfacing.
One of them was the hakot system, which on all counts were reminiscent of the years of martial rule, skillfully employed by the army of hangers-on of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, even using children pried away from their classrooms.
For the guys down here in my barangay, a scene at the Supreme Court last week brought back memories of the martial law years, aptly portrayed by this daily on the front page, featuring the waiving Marcos and Corona couples.
It seemed that the teary-eyed Chief Justice became emotional before a crowd that, according to certain media reports, gathered at the compound of the Supreme Court for the sole purpose of supporting him.
Certain media outfits even tried hard to portray the “rally” for the Chief Justice as a purely spontaneous affair. Sure—we could believe it.
Never mind that down here, most of us grew up thinking that, in this country besieged by years and years of political rallies, anybody hardly organized them to support public officials. In fact, we witnessed a lot of rallies against them. Protests, in short!
But the only problem with the “support” rally at the Supreme Court was that the placards, all expressing undying love and support for the Chief Justice, seemed to have been mass manufactured. They had the same design, even the same font.
Thus many of us down here tended to believe more the claim that spread around by word of mouth—okay, also by text messages—that the crowd in the Supreme Court compound materialized because of the infamous hakot system. It was said that a huge part of the crowd came from a religious group.
Down here we were somehow embarrassed for the Chief Justice.
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Anyway, the hakot came at a crucial time in his trial in the Senate, just when it was going deep into the SALN of the Chief Justice.
Now the SALN is an indication of whether or not a public official was truthful in declaring his belongings in cash or in kind. It was obvious from the trial so far that the Chief Justice was massaging his SALN. He hid certain multimillion peso properties here and there.
Still, in the unraveling of his SALN, the trial must touch on his bank accounts. It seems that the Chief Justice did not disclose the money in his bank accounts, amounting to something that many of us down here could not even count.
From the looks of it, even if he saved every centavo of his income as a member of the Supreme Court, his money in the banks would be difficult to explain.
And we still know nothing, officially, about his dollar deposits. All we get down here were rumors and text messages.
The dollar accounts apparently inspired the return of the hakot rally system. The same accounts also brought about a rather bold defiance by PSBank to the order of the Senate (as in a very serious “subpoena”) to produce all the bank documents of the Chief Justice. They should include the dollar accounts.
PSBank, which is under the Metrobank group of taipan George Ty, reasoned that it could be sued for disclosing the dollar accounts.
All right, the law (RA 6426, or the Foreign Currency Deposit Act) provides absolute confidentiality for all dollars deposits. Thus, citing the law, PSBank refused to disclose the bank accounts of the Chief Justice. It feared that it could be sued.
If anything, we thought that if a law was broken, the Senate should be sued for ordering PSBank to produce the dollar account documents—not the bank.
Do we take it that PSBank just decided by itself that the order of the Senate was against the law? Well, it was not as if PSBank was volunteering the information to just anybody. It was not giving away information to kidnappers. The order came from the Senate—the impeachment court.
Word has it that, about four years ago, the Chief Justice opened a dollar account with PSBank with an initial amount of $700,000. The law (the one called AMLA, or the Anti-money Laundering Act, created in 2001) required PSBank to determine the source of such a huge amount.
It was said that, in the dollar account opened by the Chief Justice, he declared the source of the money as “loans.” These should be easy to prove for the Chief Justice. Loans always leave paper trail.
And so what was the problem?
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According to the defense team of the Chief Justice, it was this thing called “absolute confidentiality” of all foreign currency deposits in this country.
If I remember correctly, in all my 35 years or so of covering the financial sector, those foreign currency laws (which by the way were started by Marcos decrees) really were intended for deposits of foreign investors and lenders.
Out of need for foreign exchange, the Philippine government decided that this country should encourage dollar deposits here so that those foreign institutions could park their dollars in local banks, without fear of being pried open by government agencies such as the BIR.
From what I gathered, the Supreme Court already used the same reasoning in allowing the opening of dollar accounts of Rep. JV Ejercito, the son of former President Joseph Estrada, in a case before the Sandiganbayan.
The senators for their part cited three rulings of the Supreme Court that, in effect, relaxed the rule on confidentiality of dollar accounts here.
Yet the Supreme Court issued a TRO to the Senate, as an impeachment court, in effect stopping the Senate from getting the information on the dollar deposits of the Chief Justice.
All the while we thought that the job of the Senate, in this impeachment trial, was just to find out the truth no matter who would get hurt. The Supreme Court just said that the Senate should not do its job.
By the way, the same justices who voted to issue the TRO that would allow former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to leave the country, and thus escape prosecution in graft and corruption cases and all sorts of other cases, were the same justices who voted to issue the TRO against the opening of the dollars accounts of the Chief Justice.
