Presidential candidate Sen Poe besieged by four cases of disqualification

Manila: Senator Grace Poe is facing four cases of disqualification as a senator and as a presidential candidate in 2016, for alleged violation of the country’s election code that involves lack of residency and citizenship which are required of elected officials.

“All the complaints filed against her will be consolidated. She was asked to present a counter-affidavit and attend her preliminary investigation for alleged violation of the country’s Omnibus Election Code, on November 3,” Commission on Elections chair Andres Bautista told Gulf News

When asked to assess the merits of the disqualification cases hurled at Poe, Senator Edgardo Angara Jr also told Gulf News, “They involve satisfaction of minimum requirements of law from anyone running for public office.”

In reaction, Poe’s spokesman, Mayor Rex Gatchalian of Valenzuela City, said, “She has been receiving baseless suits since she topped the presidential surveys.”

“Sinister minds have launched a pre-meditated and concerted effort to condition the minds of the public that Sen Poe will be disqualified,” argued Gatchalian, adding, “She continues a positive campaign for the presidency.”

Her lawyer, Atty George Garcia, insisted, “Sen Poe has met all the requirements of the law to seek for higher office.”

“But when she filed in 2012 her candidacy as a senator in the 2013 race, she was still a US citizen. She lost her US citizenship in the last quarter of 2012 — based on the records of the US Registry. This way, she also failed to satisfy the two-year residency requirement for senatorial candidates who ran in 2013,” explained Rizalito David, a failed senatorial candidate in 2013, and a presidential candidate in 2016.

Eleven years ago, Poe returned to the Philippines when her adoptive father, actor Fernando Poe died in December 2004. He had lost to former President Gloria Arroyo in the May 2004 elections. After the wake and burial, she returned to the US in February 2005; but she came to Manila, bought a house, and enrolled her children in late 2005.

“In 2005, she was a foreign visitor with a US passport. She had no immigrant certificate of residence from the Bureau of Immigration, which could prove she was as a permanent resident with an immigrant status in the Philippines,” argued Professor Antonio Contreras, a political science professor of the elite De La Salle University who filed a case against Poe on October 20.

Noting that the Senate Election Tribunal (SET which is hearing David’s complaint) has established that Poe re-acquired her Filipino citizenship on July 19, 2006, which could be the basis of counting her period of residency in the Philippines, Contreras argued, “[Using that timeline], by May 9, 2016, during the presidential elections, she will be two months and nine days away to fulfil the 10-year requirement for a presidential candidate.”

On October 19, former Senator Francisco Tatad filed a disqualification case against Poe on residency and citizenship issue. On October 16, former justice department prosecutor and former lawyer of the Government Service Insurance System Atty. Estrella Elamparo called for the cancellation of her certificate of candidacy for alleged misrepresentation in stating she is a natural-born Filipino.

Poe’s husband is a Filipino with American citizenship. She went to the US with him to finish her undergraduate studies in 1991 and became a US citizen on October 18, 2001.

Lawyers have argued that when Poe applied for dual citizenship in 2006, she did not automatically acquire a natural-born Filipino citizenship. She claimed she was an abandoned baby found by poor residents at the baptismal font of a Catholic church in Jaro, Iloilo, central Philippines in 1968.

There is no Philippine law that allows a foundling to acquire the citizenship of the state or the citizenship of those who found her. She was legally adopted twice, by a rich woman in central Philippines in 1970, and by actor Poe and his wife, actress Susan Roces in 1974. The senator has denied unconfirmed rumours that she is the love child of former president Ferdinand Marcos and Roces’ sister, former actress Rosemarie Sonora — who left for the US in 1986, after the ouster of the former strongman.