Manila: The removal from office of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona for dishonesty in submitting his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN) Tuesday is regarded as a victory for President Benigno Aquino’s centre-piece campaign against corruption, but observers said it has been influenced more by popular sentiment and politics and less by law.

For Aquino, the chief justice was a stumbling block to efforts to end a culture of corruption in the Philippines.

A vote to convict Corona could make Aquino more popular than he is now, and that would make him a kingmaker in the 2016 presidential elections, said former Senate President Ernesto Maceda.

Corona’s acquittal would be like a support for Vice-President Jejomar Binay who is planning to run for president in 2016, Maceda, an ally of Binay, said.

Earlier, Binay and former President Joseph Estrada forged an alliance between their two parties, PDP-Laban and Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino (PMP), to create the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA).

Senators who have plans to stand for re-election in 2013 under Binay’s party, voted for Corona’s conviction. They were: Alan Peter Cayetano, Francis Escudero, Gregorio Honasan, Loren Legarda, Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel, and Antonio Trillanes.

Had the Senate, sitting as an impeachment court, acquitted Corona, it would have made Aquino a lame duck president, and so will the administration party’s presidential candidate.

“Political affiliation and relationship would matter at the end of the day [in this political exercise,” Tranquil Salvador, spokesman of Corona’s defence panel, said.

 

Voting influenced

Malacañang (the presidential palace) allegedly influenced the voting for conviction with senator-judges allegedly offered funds for public infrastructure projects, the newspaper Philippine Daily Inquirer said quoting sources.

All of the above marred efforts to make the political exercise hew to the requirements of law, said three senators who voted for Corona’s acquittal.

“Impeachment is a political process, not a political assassination. An impeachment aspires to be a judicial proceeding that makes imperative that it stick to judicial rules. An impeachment must ever uphold the due process that no citizen, high or low, can be denied,” Senator Joker Arroyo (no relation to former President Gloria Arroyo), who was one of three senator-judges who voted for Corona’s acquittal, said.

The removal of Corona from office due to his non declaration of assets and liabilities, a right given to him by law, violated the Constitution, and allowed the Senate to “pass a bill of attainder,” Arroyo said in reference to judging an act as wrong when it is not yet declared wrong by law.

“This is not justice, political or legal. This is certainly not law; for sure it’s not the law of the Constitution. It’s only naked power,” Arroyo added.

Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos said Corona’s alleged violation of a constitutional provision requiring public officials to fully disclose their assets and liabilities due to his adherence to the country’s bank secrecy law om foreign currency deposit should not be considered an impeachable offence because he acted in good faith,

 

Marcos, son and namesake of the former Philippine president who was tagged by as one of the “most corrupt leaders of all time” by a corruption watchdog, also voted for Corona’s acquittal.

The feisty Miriam Defensor-Santiago, a former trial court judge who will be sitting next month as a judge in the International Criminal Court, criticised his colleagues’ explanation on why they voted for the conviction of the chief justice.

“It’s better to die as a lawyer than listen to your [non-lawyer senators’ arguments about the moral basis of their votes to convict Corona],” said feisty Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago, a former judge who would sit at the International Criminal Court next month,

Defensor-Santiago, who in explaining her vote asked God to give her a second life so she can go after congressmen and senators who misdeclared their SALN, said the world has condemned the Philippines as corrupt not because of Corona, but because of many other politicians, Majority of the 20 senators who found Corona guilty said they voted based on their moral conviction that a public official should be clean and not tainted.

Law-conscious senators earlier blamed the prosecution for presenting illegally acquired evidence against Corona.

But the public craved for the blood of corrupt government officials, and that must have set the pace of votes from the Senate.

The impeachment trial revealed that Corona did not disclose in his SALN an estimated $4 million in foreign currency bank accounts.