FORMER Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Monday asked the Supreme Court (SC) to lower the P66-million bond it earlier required for his election protest against Vice President Maria Leonor G. Robredo.
It can be recalled that the SC, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), ordered Marcos to deposit the amount needed for the resolution of the protest.
In the same order, the PET also ordered Robredo to also pay a cash deposit of P15.43 million for her counterprotest against Marcos.
Robredo was required to pay P8 million for the first tranche, also on April 16 and P7.43 million on July 14.
Under Section 33 (b) of the PET rules, a protestant is required to make a cash deposit to the Tribunal the amount of P500 per contested precinct, “if they require the bringing of the contested ballot boxes and election documents to the Tribunal”.
In his protest, Marcos contested the results in a total of 132,446 precincts in 39,221 clustered precincts covering 27 provinces and cities.
“Based on the foregoing, the cash deposit for protestant is P500 for each of the 132,446 precincts, which amounts to P66,223,000,” the PET order read.
Since Marcos already initially deposited P200,000 upon filing of his protest, he now only needs to pay the remaining P66,023,000 in two tranches—P36,023,000 on April 16 and P30 million on July 14.
In his appeal, Marcos, through lawyer Vic Rodriguez, asked the PET to defer the order for payment of the deposit pending resolution of their plea to set the case for preliminary conference.
“We have asked for a recomputation of the amount, that instead of basing it on the number of established or traditional precincts, it should be based on number of clustered precincts with the advent of the automation of our system of election,” Rodriguez told reporters.
SC Spokesman Theodore Te said the setting of the amount of deposit required in the PET case is “internal and comes with the procedure”.