Building a case against Lim
It has been 17 years since the House committee on dangerous drugs headed by then congressman Antonio Cuenco looked into the alleged links of businessmen and brothers Peter and Wellington Lim to the illegal drugs trade. That’s a long time. Cuenco is no longer in Congress, ending his run as representative of Cebu City’s south district in 2010. Months after the hearing, he succeeded in pushing for the passage of the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act that he authored.
Meanwhile, nothing much came out of the hearing except for the testimonies of Bernard Liu and Ananias Dy that the Lim brothers got their supply of illegal drugs from Hong Kong. The Lims were eventually cleared for lack of evidence but, in an ironic twist, Liu and Dy faced drug charges in court. Dy was shot dead in 2006 while Liu was found dead in his home in Talisay City in 2011.
We are mentioning this because it seems like the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) 7 and other probers are digging up what they could dig from that congressional investigation to build a case against Peter Lim, who is in President Rodrigo Duterte’s list of alleged illegal drug traffickers in the country. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has even issued a subpoena against him.
But that task is formidable considering that not only did the House committee fail to come up with solid proof against the Lim brothers, law enforcers also failed to follow up on what little the congressional probe unearthed. More than that, the two witnesses in the probe, Liu and Dy, are already dead. (Incidentally, no proof could be had supporting insinuations the Lims were behind their deaths.)
Thus we should ask if government investigators are finding it difficult to build a case against Lim now so much so that it is trying to dig something up from that congressional probe. Because if that is the case, then current moves against Lim obviously would not succeed. Any case that would be filed against Lim in court now will obviously have to rely on pieces of evidence dug up recently because the ones dredged up 17 years ago have gone stale.