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THE
Senate is moving to invoke the country’s Mutual Legal
Assistance Treaty (MLAT) with Hong Kong to get Chinese
authorities to help the Philippine government obtain
information in connection with the ongoing congressional
inquiry into the aborted $329-million national broadband
network deal awarded to Zhong Xing Telecom Equipment (ZTE)
of China.
Senate
Minority Leader Aquilino Q. Pimentel made the motion in
the face of the refusal of officials of ZTE Corporation,
a listed company in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, to
cooperate in the Senate probe of alleged overpricing of
the NBN contract.
Acting
on Pimentel’s motion, the Senate blue- ribbon committee
chaired by Sen. Alan Cayetano approved the issuance of a
subpoena to Yu Yong, ZTE president, as well as Ms. Fan
Yang, commercial attaché of the Chinese embassy in
Manila, to compel them to attend the next hearing.
“We can
invoke our rights with the
Hong Kong authorities. We have a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with
Hong Kong. We can invoke that and ask them to give us
all the information about the ZTE president and so we
can have jurisdiction over his person and compel him to
testify,” Pimentel explained.
As this
developed, however, Malacañang said on Wednesday the
alleged “script” at the Senate hearing is unraveling,
following reports of a “patriotic fund” for government
officials who would testify against the administration.
Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said the reported
existence of the fund, plus the claim of Environment
Secretary Lito Atienza and Deputy Executive Secretary
Manuel Gaite that they were apparently baited into
helping former Philippine Forest Corp. president Rodolfo
Noel Lozada Jr., point to a larger plot to discredit the
administration.
“If you
look at the objective, the modalities and the characters
doing it, it’s very obvious that it will lead to that,
why they are creating this scenario and drama,” Ermita
said in his weekly news conference.
He said
that based on what he had seen on the televised Senate
hearings, Atienza narrated that Lozada was in tears when
he asked for his help; later on, a despondent Lozada
texted Gaite to say that he was running out of money.
Ermita
noted that both officials helped Lozada, but the latter
claimed that they orchestrated his alleged abduction at
the airport, and bribed him with P500,000 to stay out of
the Senate hearings, respectively.
“And
then here comes talk about that patriotic fund. . . .
The entire script is coming out. . . . I think we are
all intelligent enough to see what is unfolding in this
drama,” Ermita said.
Commission on Higher Education (CHED) chairman Romulo
Neri earlier said that Lozada informed him of a
P20-million offer, tapped from the patriotic fund, for
him to leave the administration and testify at the
Senate hearing on the scrapped deal.
To this,
Ermita quipped: “Patriotic fund—will you be a patriot if
you accept a bribe? Is it supposed to be like that?”
Asked
whether the government has been set up, he said, “It
appears like that.”
Ermita
also clarified that the P500,000 that Gaite had sent to
Lozada is not from the former’s personal funds but is
from an anonymous source that Gaite is prepared to
divulge either at the Senate hearing, if he is invited
again, or before the Ombudsman.
He
stressed that in Gaite did not say that he had
personally funded the money in his statement to the
media on Tuesday.
“Secretary Gaite, being our senior legal officer, can
very well take care of himself. . . . He is prepared to
face the hearing should he be invited. He told me, ‘Sir,
I’m willing to tell more about it in the proper fora, in
the Ombudsman and in the Senate,’” Ermita said.
Meanwhile, aside from the alleged overpricing, Senate
probers are expected to ask Yu Yong about the alleged
role of former Commission on Elections chairman Benjamin
Abalos in the telecommunications deal.
Speaker
Jose de Venecia’s son, Jose III, had testified at the
Senate that Abalos acted as broker of the deal and tried
to bribe him and former National Economic Development
Authority Director General Romulo Neri to facilitate
approval of the ZTE project proposal by the Arroyo
government.
Pimentel
pointed out that the reported bribe attempts, allegedly
made through Abalos, were confirmed by Neri’s technical
consultant, Lozada, Jr.
“I think
it is not good for our people to see that we are only
running after the crooks in our government, and not
after those foreigners who are corrupting them,” Senator
Pimentel said. “In other words, the ZTE will be given
all the chances to show that the contract is
above-board. But let us not give them the pleasure of
ignoring our invitation on the pretext that they have no
address here.”
In the
case of Ms. Fan Yang, Pimentel said the Chinese
commercial attaché was mentioned by many witnesses as
having been present at the series of meetings between
ZTE officials and Abalos on the NBN-ZTE deal.
Since
Fan Yang is a diplomat who enjoys certain immunities,
Pimentel suggested she should be invited formally. But
if she ignores the invitation, she should be declared
persona non grata, the senator added.
Calls
for President Arroyo’s ouster continue to snowball
meanwhile.
The
latest to join and echo the call for Arroyo’s ouster are
members of various labor groups affiliated with the Fair
Trade Alliance (FTA) who called for Arroyo’s ouster and
the “dismantling” of the “government syndicate”
allegedly being run by “conjugal crime lords.”
The
labor sector of FTA, a broad multisectoral coalition of
formal and informal labor, industry, agriculture,
nongovernment organizations and youth organizations,
expressed outrage over the “scale of corruption gripping
the country” involving some of the highest officials in
the administration.
In a
statement red by Jun Umali of the National Union of Bank
Employees (Nube), the Fair Trade-Labor said: “We are one
with the people in the movement for change. The labor
sector fully supports Jun Lozada and encourages Jun
Lozada-like people out there to come out and revive the
country’s hopes and values.
Renato
Magtubo of Partido ng Masa lamented that corrupt
government officials continue to commit plunder, citing
Lozada’s expose in the Senate that corruption in
government is occurring at two levels—at 20-30 percent
“commission” per project for the moderately greedy and
at 50 percent or more for the extra greedy.
“We do
not want a government being run by a crime syndicate,”
Magtubo said.
According to Magtubo, the group will support the people
in calling for change, starting with Arroyo’s ouster.
“We will
also join peaceful prayer rallies, such as the planned
mass to be held at the Edsa Shrine and the Inter-Faith
prayer rally in Luneta,” he said. (With J. Mayuga) |
