The Abellanosa example
Cebu City south district Rep. Rodrigo Abellanosa has gone a long way since criminal and administrative cases were filed against him in 2012, with the Office of the Ombudsman finding him guilty of grave misconduct and ordering his dismissal from the service in 2014. A combination of legal and political maneuvers has ensured his continued survival as a politician, a rather mean feat.
The cases stemmed from what the anti-graft office ruled as a conflict of interest when he as Cebu City councilor helped conceived of the city’s scholarship program that had his Asian College of Technology (ACT) receiving a share of the said scholarship’s funding assistance. Abellanosa was then among ACT’s owners.
When the anti-graft office ordered his dismissal from the service, Abellanosa was already a member of the House of Representatives, having been elected as south district congressman in 2013. The order was endorsed to the House for appropriate action but two things prevented his ouster: he filed a motion for reconsideration and he was wise enough to already belong to the House majority.
Not only was Abellanosa able to complete his stint in the House, Cebu City south district voters didn’t consider his having been found guilty by the anti-graft office for grave misconduct as an issue and instead gave him another three years term in May 2016. That in turn strengthened his legal maneuver.
The result? The Court of Appeals (CA), where he eventually sought legal reprieve after the anti-graft office denied his motion for reconsideration, recently reversed the dismissal order on the basis of his having been reelected to the House. “The Court is, therefore, precluded from imposing the administrative penalty of dismissal on the account of some people’s decision to elect him again in yet another office,” the CA ruled.
The Abellanosa case is yet another proof that legal and political maneuvers, if handled deftly, could render ineffective a judicial recourse. We have seen this play out in the case of the Marcoses and even, to a certain extent, in the case of one of Ferdinand Marcos’s cronies, businessman Eduardo Cojuangco Jr.