NBI subpoenas PGMN anchor for extortion probe
The National Bureau of Investigation on Friday said it has summoned Camille Jensen “CJ” Hirro, one of the anchors at Peanut Gallery Media Network (PGMN) for questioning in connection with the extortion allegation by former Speaker Martin Romualdez against PGMN founder Franco Mabanta who was arrested earlier this week.
NBI Director Melvin Matibag also dispelled any mystery behind the source of the P75 million in the alleged payoff to Mabanta from Romualdez as the Leyte congressman’s assets had already been frozen in connection with the flood control scandal investigation by the Office of the Ombudsman.
Matibag said Hirro was earlier identified as a “person of interest” as she appeared on a video clip sent to Romualdez to force him to pay up. The video was a short “teaser” of a PGMN report on the ex-speaker’s alleged corruption. Mabanta allegedly initially demanded P350 million from Romualdez to stop its release.
Cum laude, beauty queen
Bernice Piñol Rodriguez, Mabanta’s legal counsel, said in an interview that Hirro was not a respondent in Romualdez’s complaint. She described her as a “journalist with credibility and integrity.”
Hirro joined PGMN as an anchor and commentator since the online channel was established in 2024.
Hirro is a 2009 cum laude communications art graduate from the University of the Philippines College of Media and Communications.
She joined the Miss Global Philippines beauty pageant in 2016 and won the crown. She represented the country in the Miss Global contest that year and won as first runner-up.
The NBI subpoena instructed Hirro to appear at the Office of the Organized and Transnational Crimes Division (OTCD) on May 11 to “shed light” on the investigation of the extortion complaint of Romualdez against Mabanta and four others.
Source of money
The five men were arrested on Tuesday evening in an NBI entrapment operation at Valle Verde Country Club in Pasig City where agents posing as representatives of Romualdez delivered three suitcases containing the P75 million payoff.
The money was supposed to be the first payment in four tranches totaling P300 million, which the two sides finally agreed upon to stop the showing of the video report about Romualdez’s alleged corruption.
In a Facebook post, former Election Commissioner Rowena Guanzon, another PGMN commentator-anchor, asked how Romualdez was able to produce suitcases containing millions of pesos in cash when all his assets were ordered frozen by the Court of Appeals on April 23.
Matibag told reporters on Thursday that Romualdez did not shell out any cash and only P50,000 of the total amount was real money, which was taken from the NBI’s confidential funds for use in such an entrapment operation.
The rest of the money were bogus bills “made in Recto,” where the real and the bogus were mixed. He said that this has been allowed by the Supreme Court.
‘Who’s playing politics?’
In an interview, Matibag said many people making comments on social media were not lawyers but acting as real ones, and that there were real lawyers but “don’t understand law enforcement.”
“Atty. Guanzon is a lawyer, she’s a good lawyer, but what did she say? She said where did they get the P75 million? Isn’t it that the (Romualdez) accounts had been frozen? So now, who is playing politics,” Matibag said.
Mabanta has denied the extortion allegation. “How can we extort when they were the ones who came to us,” Mabanta told reporters shortly after his arrest.
In an interview with reporters late Thursday evening, Rodriguez said they were confident the case against Mabanta would be dismissed.
“When I got the details of the case and when I saw, especially in the inquest, it was then that all the more we became confident of our defense and how weak the complaint is, how weak the case of the complainant is,” Rodriguez said.
She also said that they had assembled “a dozen lawyers” from some of the “best law firms in the country” to defend Mabanta and his coaccused.
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