Faeldon case: No whiff of corruption?

There’s still water and electricity in the Senate holding room where Nick Faeldon is detained. The ex-Customs commissioner and Marine captain had claimed that Sen. Dick Gordon would cut off the utilities. That was if he exposed the “cruel, degrading, inhumane punishment” the powerful Blue-Ribbon committee is subjecting him to for contempt. Still he rattled off the supposed blocking of his Christmas furlough with the family, preventing his doctor from checking his heart condition, and depriving him of his right to religious practices. Committee chairman Gordon could only laugh off the charges as “ridiculous.”

To begin with, Gordon explained, it is the Senate and not just his committee that holds Faeldon in contempt. The latter has been snubbing summonses to explain the 604-kilo, P6.5-billion shabu smuggling into the Manila piers during his Customs tenure last May. It is Senate President Koko Pimentel, on Gordon’s recommendation, who enforces the detention. “We can send him to the National Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa until he cooperates, but haven’t,” Gordon said. “There has been a precedent for that.”

Gordon rebutted Faeldon point-bypoint. Cutting off water and electricity to the holding room at the Senate garage would require tearing up the pipes and wiring. The room’s utilities are connected to the whole basement’s. As for the supposed holiday leave, Gordon said, the logbook shows that Faeldon’s father and children held a Christmas Mass and parties there. An ambulance is parked just outside the room for any medical emergency. The religious practice Faeldon wants to attend is tomorrow’s raucous, pre-dawn to late-night procession of the Black Nazarene in Manila. With 19 million expected participants and spectators, it’s hardly an event for supposed heart patient Faeldon to join, said Gordon, who as chairman of the Philippine Red Cross fields hundreds of medical volunteers and ambulances there each year. More than that, Faeldon could get lost in the crowd, as he had escaped from military stockade years ago for mutiny against then-President Gloria Arroyo, Gordon recounted.

What Gordon did reject was Faeldon’s request to go to Camp Aguinaldo across town to be sworn in by the Defense Secretary as new Deputy for Civil Defense. “He can take his oath before any notary public,” Gordon said. “What if, inside that Armed Forces facility, Faeldon suddenly refuses to leave? I am averting not so much a confrontation between his Senate security escorts and others, but between the Legislative and Executive branches.” The two government branches already are deeply divided over Faeldon. Pro-administration and opposition senators alike suspect him of direct involvement in if not abetting the massive narco-smuggling. His Customs deputies had let the cargo through the express lane, exempted from Customs inspection. That privilege is only for big companies with frequent upright import-export dealings with the agency. Yet the puny company and broker in the shabu case are only months old, with shady records at that. Gordon’s committee has recommended the filing by the Ombudsman of graft charges. Faeldon and two deputies resigned. President Rodrigo Duterte reappointed Faeldon to the Office of Civil Defense, and the two as assistant secretaries of transportation. Not only arch-foe Sen. Antonio Trillanes has criticized Duterte for it. (All three re-appointees were Trillanes’ cohorts in the 2003 mutiny.) Gordon and Sen. Ping Lacson of the administration majority, and Partido Demokratiko ng Pilipinas party-mate Pimentel too wonder why Duterte is gambling away political good-

Gordon says they can detain him at the National Penitentiary in Muntinlupa.