Mocking time-honored doctrine on conspiracy
This is in reference to the news, “No plunder in P50-M bribery case, says Lam ‘bagman’” (4/7/18), where retired police official Wenceslao Sombero Jr., the alleged bagman of online gaming tycoon Jack Lam, was said to have filed a motion to dismiss the complaint against him in the Sandiganbayan invoking a 2016 Supreme Court decision acquitting former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of plunder.
That decision favoring Arroyo was no good! That Supreme Court was packed by Arroyo loyalists who just couldn’t care less if their ruling insulted everybody else’s intelligence!
In a blatant act of fawning, they made a mockery of the time-honored doctrine on conspiracy that “the act of one is the act of all”!
Being then only one of the 10 accused, Arroyo should be answerable to only P36.6 million, an amount way below the P50 million required by law to charge a public official with the nonbailable crime of plunder.
Now comes Sombero latching on to that weird ruling, arguing that assuming P50 million was involved in the bribery of the two Bureau of Immigration officials concerned, each of them should also be answerable for only P25 million.
Hence, there can be no plunder case against any of them, much less against him as the alleged bagman who only made
the delivery.
In other words, Sombero’s lawyer is just invoking the constitutional right of his client to “equal protection of the law” in that what was applicable to Arroyo’s case should also be applicable to his.
In the plunder cases against so-called “pork barrel queen” Janet Lim Napoles, several persons — among them congressmen, senators and their gofers — were included for conspiracy. By thus simply dividing the loot among them, each of them would be deemed hypothetically to have partaken of less than the threshold amount of P50 million and should thus be home free.
Is this now the new “normal” in this country’s justice system? Heaven help us!
RAMON TORREFRANCA, [email protected]
