Passion For Reason
Getting fired over a TV cooking show
By Raul Pangalangan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:15:00 09/12/2008
Filed Under: Politics, Crisis, Graft & Corruption, Judiciary (system of justice)
MANILA, Philippines—Thailand’s Constitutional Court recently forced Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej out of office for violating the constitutional ban on outside employment. Samak had accepted $2,350 for appearing on four shows of the program “Tastings, Complaining,” which he had hosted as celebrity chef for seven years, giving it up two months after he was sworn in as prime minister. His defense was that the money was merely reimbursement for transportation expenses and for cooking ingredients. (He should have gone all the way, and followed in the eminent steps of the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, who is said to have trained as a pastry chef under the legendary French master Escoffier.)
Samak and his cabinet have now stepped down, but only temporarily. His party apparently has the option to reelect him as prime minister and is bent on doing so.
Samak’s firing coincides with widespread People Power-type protests apparently led by the same guys who ousted Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006 and precipitated the anti-Thaksin coup. They had earlier camped out for days around his office, bedecked in the royalist yellow.
However, other observers have lamented that the Constitutional Court trivialized its office by elevating a petty violation to a constitutional issue, and manipulating a narrow technicality to ride on the coattails of popular outrage. It is not that Samak shouldn’t be ousted, but let him be ousted electorally—through a vote of no-confidence in parliament, or by voting his party out of office in general elections—or if judicially, by convicting him of weighty charges equal to the stature of his office.
What the anti-Thaksin/Samak protesters seem to be setting up is similar to the anti-Joseph Estrada movement in 2001. In both cases, the protesters aim for the alchemy of a popular movement and a judicial verdict, which separately couldn’t oust a sitting leader but which together can effect the ouster and then legitimize it. In Samak’s case, perhaps it was hoped that the Constitutional Court would break the impasse, force him to step down albeit temporarily, and use that interval to provide a way out for Samak to save his face and his followers to save their hides.
Now, contrast that to Philippine electoral and judicial politics. Here we have the “Hello, Garci” tapes on which a voice, distinctively President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s, conspired with then-election commissioner Virgilo Garcillano to cook (as in “lutong macau”) the 2004 presidential election. Today, three years after the presidential spokesman, no less, played the tapes before TV cameras, the spurious winner in that election remains in power, and Garci remains a free man. We have Joc-Joc Bolante, ex-undersecretary of agriculture and chief culprit in the diversion of fertilizer funds for a presidential campaign. The US has rejected his plea of asylum—and the secretary of justice announces that he will be welcome back home without the fear of arrest or indictment just like any citizen, in other words, just like the rest of us who have never pocketed or siphoned off billions of pesos in fertilizer funds.
And now the Court of Appeals scandal. A foreign observer sat in one of the hearings conducted by the panel of retired Supreme Court justices—Carolina Grino-Aquino, Flerida Ruth P. Romero and Romeo Callejo Sr. He found the hearings so refreshing in their transparency because they gave us a rare glimpse of the human frailties that lie behind the judicial façade. I am thus perplexed that the Court, having acted with deliberate dispatch and having been furnished the evidence on a silver platter, seemed to hold back on chastising some of the dramatis personae.
Whatever happened to Camilo Sabio, chairman of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), and Jesus Santos, counsel for President Arroyo’s husband and whom Arroyo appointed to the board of the government’s pension fund, the GSIS?
In the case of the PCGG chairman, his own brother, Justice Jose Sabio Jr., testified under oath that Camilo spoke to him about the case involving Manila Electric Co (Meralco), the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS). Camilo has confirmed as much. The timing was even worse. Camilo phoned his brother twice about the case, the first time even before Jose himself became aware of the “advance information that he had been selected the third member of the division” that would hear the case. Camilo belongs to the executive branch and is beyond the Court’s disciplinary power, and the Court did right in referring the case to the bar confidant for professional misconduct.
In the case of the First Gentleman’s lawyer, it is even worse. He sits on the governing board of the GSIS, a party with a direct interest in the case. Sabio can at least claim he was just doing what he thought was right (though he is a presidential appointee, and the dirty hands of his principals are all over the place in this case). But apparently only Sabio and not Santos was referred to the bar confidant for investigation.
If Santos phoned Camilo Sabio, it wasn’t because Sabio was PCGG chairman but because he was the brother of the Court of Appeals justice who would sit in judgment in the case. It means that the GSIS board member was privy to the “advance information” about a case involving the GSIS and found the link in Camilo. I hope that the chain of events will be fully reported in the Supreme Court decision.
This is one of those rare moments in legal history when the stories that are usually heard in hushed tones in the corridors are suddenly documented for all to see. The Supreme Court decision should aim not merely to punish but to teach. It must expose a story that many judges and lawyers have seen and not told and, now by telling, steel them for those moments when, tempted, they might yield.
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