Ripe for reckoning

The controversy over the $329-million National Broadband Network deal between the Philippine government and China’s ZTE Corp. has yet to see closure no matter that it was ultimately scuttled and much water has since flowed under the bridge. Testimonies of greed that necessitated expert “mitigation” and of moneymaking so aggressive that it would not be ignored even in a milieu of excess (“bubukol”) have yet to vanish into the interstices of collective memory. Indeed, the NBN-ZTE deal, with its purported overprice of $130 million to cover bribes, the payment of which was to have been shouldered by Filipino taxpayers, is one of the scandals that require just resolution if the Aquino administration is to make good on its anticorruption promise.

The arrest warrants issued on Tuesday by the Sandiganbayan on former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her husband Mike Arroyo, former Commission on Elections Chair Benjamin Abalos and former Transportation and Communications Secretary Leandro Mendoza raise the possibility of the matter being settled once and for all. The project to install a high-speed telecommunications network linking government agencies nationwide, actually a logical undertaking in a country aspiring to firm up a niche among the developing nations, was such a plum involving top-drawer personalities that it collapsed under the weight of all that wheeling and dealing. The bare bones of it appear to be that highly placed operators padded the project cost to get the enterprise going and make all the concerned parties happy, except that an important character bridled at finding himself the odd man out and forthwith blew the whistle. As in a morality play, thus began the unraveling, aided by the astoundingly bold abduction of a man who knew where the bodies are buried, so to speak. Now, after being snowed under by the flurries of other scandals, all but lost in the nether world of unfinished business, the case seems ripe for reckoning.

It’s about time. Recall that the sordid details came to light in a Senate investigation late in 2007 that enjoyed live media coverage and intense public attention, much like today’s impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona. Then as now, crucial points in the narrative—for example, conversations occurring in the golf games commonly used as occasions for persons of influence to pull rank (“Back off!”) or turn on the charm (“Sec, may 200 ka dito”)—emerged to be pieced together, producing a familiar tale of huge sums of money and the wielding of great power. With all that has been said and the initial cases filed, never mind that two against Arroyo and her husband were dropped by the Office of the Ombudsman in August 2009 (for immunity against suit and absence of evidence, respectively), would attentive observers not nurse the suspicion that a pooh-bah such as Abalos was fronting for the then first couple? Why would the elections chair be involved in a communications project, in the first place, if not for the gravy train? (The man stood to earn a commission of more than $100 million, according to the Senate testimony of government consultant Rodolfo Lozada Jr.) And why would Arroyo tear herself away from the side of her then gravely ill husband in April 2007 to fly to China to witness the signing of the contract despite being informed earlier by then Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Romulo Neri of Abalos’ purported bribe offer to ensure the deal’s approval?

Arroyo scrapped the NBN-ZTE contract five months later, in September 2007, as a concession to loud allegations of bribery and of her husband’s meddling in the big-ticket project. But it’s time for questions to be posed—and answered—including the not insignificant matter of why she agreed to a golf game and then some with ZTE officials at the company’s headquarters in China in 2006, when the proposed deal was still being appraised by her administration. It’s time for Neri to break his puzzling silence on Arroyo and to explain his own golf games and other meetings with Abalos even after the latter’s purported bribe offer. It’s time for Mike Arroyo to definitively disprove the moneybags tag. Yes, call in the rest of the dramatis personae—the Jose de Venecias (father and son), the ZTE officials, Mendoza and the major and minor communications officials concerned, Lozada, even then Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez.

It’s time to begin to clear the murky arena of government contracts and the Byzantine ways with which taxpayers get shafted.