‘Sabungeros’ case: PCSO chair Reyes gets thrown into arena
The chair of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) on Wednesday dared a “whistleblower” who implicated him in the case of the missing “sabungeros” to show proof that he had intervened to “fix” the legal problems of controversial businessman Charlie “Atong” Ang.
Felix Reyes, who is also a retired court judge now on the list of applicants to be the next Ombudsman, said Julie “Totoy” Patidongan should just “shut up” if he could not prove the claims he was making in media interviews.
“I categorically deny such wild accusations of Mr. Patidongan. I dare him to identify any specific case of Mr. Atong Ang or anything related to the Sabungero Case, which I understand is still pending in court, that I fixed or settled to the advantage of Mr. Ang,” Reyes said in a statement on Wednesday.
In a radio interview on TrueFM on July 4, Patidongan said Ang had maintained ties with a former judge who currently chairs the PCSO. The judge went unnamed in the interview.
Why Ang is ‘confident’
Patidongan was one of the six security personnel of the Manila Arena cockpit who were charged with kidnapping and serious illegal detention in connection with the case. He is currently out on bail.
According to him, Ang, his former employer, sued him at the Mandaluyong City Prosecutor’s Office on July 3 supposedly for extortion—and that Ang chose that city to file the complaint because the former judge holds sway in its local courts.
Patidongan said “the former judge who is now the chairman of PCSO is the one handling all the cases, which is why Mr. Atong Ang is so confident.”
Rare coincidence
In an earlier interview on July 2 with ABS-CBN, Patidongan made the same allegation that a former judge served as Ang’s “fixer” who approached other members of the judiciary, joining certain prosecutors and judges in travels abroad to do the “case-fixing.”
In his statement, Reyes said it was a “rare coincidence” that Patidongan came out with the allegations against him a day after he applied for the position of the Ombudsman.
“I would also like to authorize the Bureau of Immigration to disclose my travels abroad from the time I retired from the judiciary on October 01, 2021, up to present to dispel any notion of travels abroad with prosecutors and judges,” he said.
The PCSO chair said he was willing to cooperate in any investigation concerning Patidongan’s “baseless allegations,” in order to “spare the judiciary and the prosecution service from the undeserved tarnishing of these institutions.”
Chief Justice told
On Monday, Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla said he had talked to Chief Justice Alexander Gesmundo about investigating members of the judiciary who were being linked to the mass disappearance of the cockfighting aficionados.
Remulla said the still-unnamed officials may have exerted “transactional” influence in the case of one “powerful” individual.
In his media interviews, Patidongan, once a trusted aide of Ang, named the businessman and his associates in the online cockfighting operator Pitmaster as the brains behind the disappearance of the sabungeros from April 2021 to January 2022.
He claimed that the victims were abducted and strangled to death for being engaged in cheating or match fixing, and that their bodies were later dumped in Taal Lake in Batangas province.
