Now speed it up
Three months after being provisionally accepted into the Witness Protection Program ostensibly due to threats on her life, Janet Lim Napoles has lost the privilege. The Department of Justice took her out of the WPP after three divisions of the Sandiganbayan rejected her petition to be transferred from Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig to a safehouse under DOJ custody.
Napoles is being held without bail as the accused mastermind in the pork barrel scam. She claims that someone else designed and oversaw the scam and she merely implemented it. This is not an implausible story, considering her background and the complexity of the national budget process, the pork barrel system and the rules on setting up and channeling funds to non-government organizations.
The truth, however, is best established in court, and the judicial process is moving at its usual glacial pace. Napoles’ bid to turn state witness was just the latest delay in her trial, and what should be a continuing effort to pin down every lawmaker and private individual who benefited from the large-scale siphoning of public funds.
Napoles’ second cousin Benhur Luy, the whistle-blower in the scam, has provided damning testimony against her and several lawmakers. Solicitor General Jose Calida successfully moved to overturn Napoles’ conviction on charges of illegally detaining Luy, but this should not derail the main case. It should prove harder for Calida to defend Napoles in the main accusation of funneling lawmakers’ Priority Development Assistance Funds or pork barrel through bogus NGOs and into personal bank accounts.
Napoles wanted to turn state witness ostensibly to identify the “real” mastermind. She can still do this, if she really wants to tell the country the whole truth and not simply save her own neck.
Aside from Luy’s testimony, there are voluminous documents presented by the Commission on Audit implicating about 200 lawmakers, many of them still in Congress, in the misuse of the pork barrel. After three opposition senators were arrested and held without bail in connection with the scam, however, the zeal to prosecute has considerably flagged.
This scandal erupted way back in 2013. How long will the country have to wait before anyone is convicted? At its current pace, this could go the way of the fertilizer fund scam during the 2004 election campaign. Several defendants in this scandal have gotten off the hook after various courts went along with their complaints about the “inordinate delay” in their court indictments. With Napoles out of the WPP, litigation in the pork barrel cases should move faster.