Devious acts, laughing matters
Something that the prosecution brought up on Day 12 of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte made many double up in laughter, and soon video clips of it went viral on Facebook. A friend of mine who watched the clip said she had not laughed so hard (onomatopoeic naghalakhak) in a long time and “it felt so good.” Great dopamine fix.
That was when prosecution counsel Lorna Kapunan read out names of signatories on acknowledgment receipts that would make one look again, names of recipients of cash from the intelligence fund of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd) that came straight out of a “laff-in” show. This was when the prosecution presented lawyer Roderick Wamil, former head of the Confidential Funds Audit Office of the Commission on Audit (COA).
Kapunan read the name Andy C. Lim, which sounded like andilim (a contraction of ang dilim or it’s so dark), and repeated it several times then muttered for all to hear that no wonder she couldn’t see well because “andilim.” Other curious-sounding names followed, but defense counsel Michael Poa objected because, he said, Kapunan was “coloring the contents of the documents.” But here’s one more you might also object to, Kapunan said with a straight face, and read the name Alejandro Pikit. Pikit means eyes closed. No wonder, she said in Filipino, that it looks dark because the eyes are closed. If Senator-judge Francis Escudero and even defense counsel Poa were suppressing a laugh, they did not show it. I had my dopamine fix.
The many names that seemed deviously invented just so the millions that went into the VP’s confidential/intelligence funds could be justified had first been tackled in a House of Representatives hearing last year. I remember saying in this column that the persons who were tasked to come up with those dubious acknowledgment receipts (no official receipts) must have been so disgusted with the dirty criminal task that they thought they might as well make a mockery of it. Or, if they thought they were doing a clever job of faking names but couldn’t, for the life of them, think of any more credible-sounding signatories, it was just as well. Wittingly or unwittingly, they did expose something “rotting in the moonlight.”
If the first weeks of the impeachment trial had the cloak-and-dagger feel to it because it was about the VP’s intent to kill President Marcos, first lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and former Speaker Martin Romualdez, and her having contracted a hitman to do it in the event that she bites the dust (Article 4 of the impeachment case), Article 2 on the confidential funds involves a paper and money trail, records, receipts, liquidations, etc. It could sound tedious and boring but this is more damning because it involves millions of funds that have to be accounted for.
So back to those dubious names in the laff-in department, if Your Honors please.
Mary Grace Piattos, Dodong Alcala, Dodong Bina, Dodong Bunal, Dodong Darong, Dodong S. Barok, Jay Kamote, Miggy Mango, Xiaome Ocho, Beverly Clare Pampano, Mico Harina, Sala Kasin, Patty Ting, Ralph Josh Bacon, Cannor Adrian Contis, Claire Nikka Lasagna, Kikoy Origano, Matthew Keso, Amoy Liu, Fernan Amuy Joug de Asim, Renan Piatos, Pia Piatos-Lim … The list is long.
These are some of the suspicious names among the more than a thousand signatories who reportedly received confidential funds totaling P612.5 million from the OVP and DepEd when the VP was education secretary. These names were submitted to the COA. Suspicious because there are no records of them being Filipino citizens, that is, no birth, marriage, and death certificates of theirs that can be found in the Philippine Statistics Authority. So, who are they, where are they?
Flashback: The name Mary Grace Piattos was the first to hit the news last year because Mary Grace is the name of a popular chain of restaurants, and Piattos is a brand of high-calorie chips. The unlikelihood that that name exists was cause for LOL moments.
House Majority Leader and La Union Rep. Paolo Ortega V referred to the names as “team grocery” because they were derived from food brands sold in grocery stores. His question at that time: “If these are not real people, where did the funds go? But just as important, whose idea was it to concoct such names?”
As I said earlier, a left-handed compliment if not a thank you must go to those who, in their disgust perhaps, invented those names.
In a news report at that time of the House investigation, Ortega said that of the 1,992 individuals who signed as recipients of the confidential funds, 1,322 had no birth certificates, 1,456 had no marriage records, and 1,593 had no death records. Manila Rep. Joel Chua, chair of the House committee on good government and public accountability (now a member of the House prosecution panel), said that 405 of 677 names listed as recipients of DepEd confidential funds had no birth records.
More dubious names will come up in next week’s hearings. They are grist for jokers, punsters, caricaturists, humorists, and even fire-and-brimstone homilists. Who will have the last laugh?
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