Confounding lucky streak
Some guys have all the luck. Take the case of former Sen. Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr., whose batting average with the Sandiganbayan is now 17.5—acquitted of one count of plunder in connection with the pork barrel scam in 2018, and 16 related graft cases in 2021 all dismissed on grounds of insufficient evidence.
The half-point is for his most recent victory of getting the antigraft court to grant him bail, despite the nonbailable malversation case he faces over an alleged ghost flood control project in Bulacan worth P92.8 million.
Revilla walked out of jail after about six months in detention after posting a P1-million bail—an amount that is likely peanuts for someone of his wealth and position.
The former lawmaker’s seemingly unending streak of success before the Sandiganbayan is confounding. This is the same guy, for one, who has yet to return P124.5 million in civil damages to the national treasury. While the antigraft court had cleared him of plunder in 2018 for allegedly amassing P224.5 million in pork barrel kickbacks, it had also ordered him to pay up—a baffling decision, to say the least, because on one hand it absolved Revilla of thievery, then in the next breath ruled that he had to give back money to the government.
‘Seasoned senator’
Eight years on, the Sandiganbayan has yet to bother explaining or clarifying, much less enforcing, that forked-tongue decision. Revilla has taken advantage of that judicial inaction by blithely going about his way and refusing to pay even a single cent of the millions he owes the public till.
In the 2018 plunder case, someone else did pay for the crimes allegedly committed by Revilla—his co-accused and chief of staff Richard Cambe, who was convicted and died in prison in April 2021 at the age of 54. By a 3-2 vote, the Sandiganbayan cleared Revilla because it said his guilt was not proven beyond reasonable doubt, but convicted Cambe because he was positively identified by witnesses as the point person for transactions involving Revilla’s pork barrel funds.
In his dissenting opinion against Revilla’s acquittal, however, Associate Justice Efren de la Cruz pointed out that Cambe’s actions could only have happened by order and authority of Revilla—on behalf of his boss who was a “seasoned senator,” in De la Cruz’s telling description.
Dissented strongly
The big fish escapes, the underling takes the fall: That same scenario appears to be unfolding in the latest case against Revilla, who was ordered arrested last January for graft and malversation for allegedly conspiring with public works officials and personnel on a flood control project in Pandi, Bulacan province that turned out to be nonexistent. Specifically, Revilla et al. are charged with allowing the release of some P76 million as payment to a private contractor that bagged the P92.8-million project.
Yet when the Sandiganbayan Third Division ruled to make the nonbailable malversation case suddenly bailable—due to the “failure of the prosecution to establish strong evidence of guilt,” it said—it afforded that benefit only to Revilla. His alleged co-conspirators, among them former Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Bulacan First District engineers Brice Hernandez and Jaypee Mendoza—remained in jail, their similar bail applications denied.
The Third Division chair, Associate Justice Karl B. Miranda, dissented strongly from his two colleagues’ arguments favoring Revilla’s bail appeal, which leaned on the technicality that the alleged project kickbacks paid by the private contractor were not yet public funds.
Unsettling decision
For Miranda, according to the Court Briefer, “the alleged acts of Revilla may only be appreciated properly when contextualized in the ‘kalakaran’ or scheme perpetrated in the DPWH … As such, the acts of all of the accused, including Revilla, must not be viewed in isolation but as a part of a broader pattern of conduct.”
“It is not required to prove that Revilla personally intervened in congressional deliberations to ensure the funding of the project. It is sufficient to show that he committed overt acts, in the absence of which, the project would not have been included in the GAA (General Appropriations Act),” Miranda stressed.
Revilla as the project proponent was, after all—what was that description again?—a “seasoned senator.”
And so, once again, the well-off and well-connected gets to walk free, even if only temporarily, while the sundry subordinates are left to stew in prison. The unsettling decision leaves a “pall of judicial doubt,” as Inquirer columnist Segundo Eclar Romero put it. “A court may reach a legally permissible result and still damage public confidence when it creates the appearance that political prominence produces exceptional relief.”
While Revilla enjoys his relief from jail time, the public can only wonder at the stranger and stranger turns the country’s justice system is taking.
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