Public office, personal gain

n his second victory in nine months, Rep. Rodrigo Abellanosa has won his case before the Sandiganbayan.

The anti-graft court dismissed the charge filed last October 2016 against the Cebu City congressman, saying there was insufficient ground to try him for corruption. There’s even a neat coincidence.

In May last year, more than 51,000 voters handed Abellanosa a fresh term in the House of Representatives. This year, the Sandiganbayan’s First Division ruled there was nothing wrong with the fact that while Abellanosa was a councilor of Cebu City, the private school of which he was a trustee and president stood to collect more than P51.06 million from the City Government.

The Sandiganbayan didn’t need 51 reasons to drop the case. One sufficed.

When he asked the Sandiganbayan to dismiss the charge, Abellanosa argued that the document he had signed in 2011 was not an ordinance, but a resolution. It was “merely an expression of sentiment or opinion” on a scholarship program that the executive department proposed. Abellanosa’s point was that it wasn’t the council, but then Mayor Michael Rama, who established the scholarship program and determined which schools should be accredited to enroll the City’s scholars. That the Asian College of Technology International Educational Foundation (ACTIEF) became one of the implementing schools wasn’t Abellanosa’s doing, but of the mayor’s.

And the Sandiganbayan’s First Division agreed. It disagreed, however, with Abellanosa’s other argument that the delay in the case, first filed in December 2012, had stripped the ombudsman’s office of its authority over the matter.

The ruling may bring relief not only to ACTIEF, part of whose payments the City suspended when Rama was mayor, but also to the scholars who didn’t receive their credentials while their tuition remained unpaid.

We can only hope it reminds the City to reinforce safeguards in its scholarships and other programs, so that public officials don’t get to decide on or endorse transactions in which they have direct or indirect interests. Consider the uproar after senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, during a White House briefing two weeks ago, urged people to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff,” after a department store stopped selling the presidential daughter’s clothing and accessories lines.

The basic point should be obvious, even if stating it makes one look naive: public officials aren’t supposed to use their authority and influence for personal gain. They can try, and sometimes they might even win, but that point remains worth emphasizing.