Officials of the presidential palace in Manila yesterday tried to contain a major embarrassment for President Gloria Arroyo after she wrongly presented a witness in a multi-million peso tax scandal as the suspect.
Officials of the presidential palace in Manila yesterday tried to contain a major embarrassment for President Gloria Arroyo after she wrongly presented a witness in a multi-million peso tax scandal as the suspect.
Last Friday, Arroyo held a press conference to present Acsa Ramirez, a cashier at the Land Bank of the Philippines, as one of those involved in the P203 million ($4 million) tax payment diversion scandal.
The President had said that the apprehension of Ramirez was part of the government's drive against corruption.
However, yesterday, the Land Bank Employees Association said Ramirez was not a suspect, but instead was the one who tipped off authorities about the multi-million peso scam.
"The government committed a big blunder when it presented the wrong suspect. Ramirez, in fact, was the one who informed Land Bank president, Gary Teves, about the anomaly which led to the fall of the real culprit," Manny Donato, the group's president, said in a radio interview yesterday.
The National Bureau of Investigation on Friday charged Artemio San Juan Jr., branch manager of Land Bank branch in Manila's eastern Binangonan town, with 17 counts of violating the anti-money laundering law for allegedly diverting about P203 million pesos worth of taxes into at least three accounts named to fictitious individuals from January to June this year.
The arrest of San Juan took place several days after Arroyo announced a renewed crack-down against bureaucratic corruption.
Teves, in a separate interview, said: "Personally, I think Ramirez is innocent. But we can't just rule out anybody's involvement from the case while it is being investigated. Everybody is suspect here."
Donato said the experience of being presented as the suspect in the scam by the President herself has traumatised Ramirez and he warned that such incidents could discourage other employees from turning in information to authorities and could hamper the drive against corruption.
However, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) which investigated the case, defended Arroyo for the faux pas in an official statement it released yesterday.
The NBI said Arroyo had not positively tagged Ramirez as a suspect. In a letter to Press Secretary, Ignacio Bunye, NBI Director, Reynaldo Wycoco, said that while he was interviewing Acsa Ramirez, the President passed by the NBI office in Manila to inquire about the progress of the investigation into the large scale tax diversion fraud.
"Consequently, she (the President) decided to meet Ramirez but the President did not categorically announce whether Ramirez was a suspect or not," Wycoco said.
Wycoco noted that Ramirez, who has been working as cashier of the Binangonan branch since April, 2002, was invited by the NBI to shed light on certain matters relevant to the ongoing investigation of the tax fraud.
He added that Ramirez was allowed to go home after the first interview on August 1 but was requested to return on August 4 for a lie detector test. But Ramirez remains in the custody of the NBI.
Arroyo has been chided for her apparent efforts to project herself as a tough crime fighter.
Recently, the Patriotic Alliance (Bayan) criticised her series of appearances before the press where she presented apprehended suspects in kidnap-for-ransom cases and similar crimes.
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