If the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) had plotted it, it couldn’t have done a better job. By the time Team PNoy held its last rally in Amoranto Stadium last Friday, it was showing the cracks. Two of the senatorial candidates were frosty to each other. Or at least one was to the other, who was Loren Legarda toward Alan Peter Cayetano. Noticeably—all the reports noticed it—she refused to buss him in the cheek.
Acting on the motion of PSBank, the Supreme Court dismissed the bank’s petition to stop the Senate from opening the dollar deposits of then Chief Justice Renato C. Corona on the ground that the case had become moot and academic. The impeachment trial has long been terminated and the Court’s adjudication of this case is no longer relevant or material to the impeachment proceedings.
The mayoral election in Lucena City has long been over and a winner proclaimed, and another election is coming up, but the losers in that previous election are still trying to win it at the Commission on Elections (Comelec). Barbara Talaga has been proclaimed winner in the mayoral election held on May 10, 2010, in [...]
This has reference to the front-page news story by Ronnel W. Domingo regarding the filing by the Department of Finance’s antigraft body of cases against six Bureau of Internal Revenue officials with the Office of the Ombudsman and the Civil Service Commission (CSC), in connection with their assets and liabilities (“6 BIR officials face raps over SALN,” Inquirer, 7/13/12).
The philosopher Confucius was not confused when he said: “In a country that is well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of; in a badly governed country, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
President Aquino must have been ill-advised on the bank account waiver issue that cropped up as an offshoot from the Corona impeachment trial.
The Foreign Currency Deposits Act (FCDA) was passed by Congress decades ago, when we had a shortage of foreign exchange and investments. Some rich Filipinos were afraid of peso devaluation and therefore kept their savings in dollars. But we had currency controls, so some corrupt Filipinos deposited their dollars in banks abroad to keep these out of the reach of the Philippine government. Also, foreign investors were shying away from the Philippines because of the same currency controls.
Within hours of the removal of Renato Corona as chief justice after the Senate impeachment court found him guilty of betrayal of public trust for failing to disclose all his bank deposits, the Supreme Court ordered on Wednesday all justices and judges to make public their statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs) for 2011 in an apparent effort to repair the damage wrought on the reputation of the judiciary by Corona’s 6-month trial.
The senator-judges of the impeachment court are to render their decision on the guilt or innocence of Chief Justice Renato Corona as this is being written, and I don’t see how anyone of them, including Senators Joker Arroyo and Miriam Defensor-Santiago, can acquit him unless the senator-judge is thoroughly biased, deaf and blind, gullible, or stupid.
I am not pro-Corona, I just want to be fair. It seems to me that from the start, there was no genuine verification of the articles of impeachment. How could the esteemed 188 House members have read and understood the charges when they had already voted for impeachment while the corresponding document was still being printed?
Chief Justice Renato Corona’s statement during the impeachment trial has been commonly seen as an appeal to emotion, rather than law. I don’t entirely agree. There were key portions directed to legal arguments but they would matter only if there remain swing votes among the senator-judges. Those portions pertain to three issues: the Basa-Guidote expropriation [...]
After a six-week recess, the Senate will resume Monday, May 7, the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato C. Corona with the defense continuing the presentation of its evidence. Though the impeachment complaint listed eight charges, denominated as “Articles of Impeachment,” the prosecution withdrew five of them.
