Some of Sereno’s SALNs remain missing

Some statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs) of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno remain unaccounted for. This emerged at yesterday’s resumption of the hearing on her impeachment by the House committee on justice.

Committee chairman Oriental Mindoro Rep. Reynaldo Umali told panel members that the Office of the Ombudsman had declared it had “no copy” of Sereno’s SALN, except for the one for 1998 when she was still teaching at the University of the Philippines.

Neither Sereno nor her spokesmen have refuted or justified the missing SALNs.

UP custodians Angela Escoto and her deputy Rosemarie Fabiona testified earlier that all they had culled from the chief magistrate’s 201 File was her SALN for 2002 – meaning her 2001, 2003 up to 2009 SALNs were missing. The years covered the period prior to her judiciary appointment in 2010.

The two UP officials had suggested that legislators check with the Office of the Ombudsman, the repository of all SALNs.

Sereno was employed at the UP College of Law before she was appointed to the Supreme Court by former president Benigno Aquino III in August 2010.

Congressmen were surprised to learn from lawyer Annaliza Ty-Capacite, executive officer of the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC), that they too didn’t have copies of Sereno’s SALNs from 2012, when she was appointed chief justice.

JBC is a constitutional body that screens all nominees to the judiciary and the ombudsman.

She testified these SALNs could have been in the custody of the JBC recruitment office headed by lawyer Socorro Inting, following the adoption of a policy by the JBC and its “core members” – meaning SC justices – that all SALN requests be coursed through Inting’s office.

“If that’s the case then we will be forced to subpoena the four regular members of the JBC because it seems they’re higher than the SC. Time will come when they themselves will not release their SALN,” Leyte Rep. Vicente Veloso remarked in Filipino.

“If you will not present SALN, then what will that mean? You’re obstructing justice,” Veloso, a former Court of Appeals justice, told Capacite.

Umali then directed the committee secretariat to issue a “subpoena” for Inting.

Umali promised to raise the issue before the entire JBC panel tomorrow. “I’ll raise this before the JBC en banc, on what is the way forward to this,” he said.

He used to be a member of the JBC from July 2016 when he became committee chairman until July this year when a term sharing agreement – based on an SC ruling – effectively made his Senate counterpart Sen. Richard Gordon the legistature’s representative in the body.

Also yesterday, Court Administrator Jose Midas Marquez said Sereno’s creation of a committee and a technical working group may have stalled decisions on petitions for retirement benefits for justices and judges and their surviving spouses.

Prior to the creation of the TWG and the committee on survivorship applications, Marquez said requests filed in his office were promptly turned over to the SC and assigned to a justice. The whole process took only about two or three weeks to complete, he said.

“After the committee was created and the TWG was organized umaabot ng halos dalawang taon bago maaksyunan ang kanilang application (applications were acted upon after almost two years),” he told the Umali committee.

The committee was created through Memorandum Order 43-2015.

In his Power Point presentation, Marquez showed that no applications for such benefits were acted upon from October 2015 to November this year.

Under the law (RA 9946), the surviving legitimate spouse of a justice or judge is entitled to receive all the retirement benefits the deceased justice or judge would have received had he or she not died.

The order creating the committee was signed by Sereno and Justices Antonio Carpio and Presbitero Velasco.

But Marquez said Sereno’s creation of two additional TWGs to handle the processing of the petitions for benefits could have worsened the process.

He clarified though that his testimony was not for or against anyone, but only for the “truth.”

A majority of the claimants are aged between 80 and over 90.

Marquez said that according to news reports, one of the claimants died while her application was pending.

Gadon warned

Administration lawmakers, meanwhile, warned impeachment complainant Lorenzo Gadon to be more circumspect in his allegations of bribery in the Senate, saying he could be cited in contempt and his claims could compromise the integrity of the proceedings.

Reps. Alfredo Garbin of party-list Ako Bicol, Romeo Acop of Antipolo City and Vincent Crisologo of Quezon City took turns in reminding Gadon to be careful in his pronouncements, particularly on the alleged P200-million war chest of an “oligarch.”