Conflicting assurances from Corona and defense

No less than former Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban politely but firmly pointed out the fact that impeached Chief Justice Renato Corona is engaged in doublespeak: Corona claims one thing while his lawyers led by retired Justice Serafin Cuevas say  the exact opposite.

An example cited by Panganiban was the media blitz conducted by Corona in which he vowed to personally testify in his trial since, according to him, he has nothing to hide. But then, Corona’s lawyers aver, in a position that is poles apart from Corona’s own, that they see no reason for their client to testify.

If I may cite a parallel example: There’s Corona’s claim that he’d open “in due time” all of his bank accounts (including his dollar deposits whose opening by the Senate had been stopped by a temporary restraining order by Corona’s Supreme Court).

Again, while Corona vows to go to the right, his lawyers are veering to the left. In the case of the bank accounts, Corona’s counsels even dared to try the unthinkable, which was to ask the Senate to declare inadmissible all the evidence on the bank deposits on their assertion that they were the “fruits of the poisoned tree,” having emanated from a bank leak.

Corona should listen to his predecessor in Panganiban, especially for him to concentrate on the “gut issues” like the big discrepancies between his declarations in his statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs) and his apparent net worth based on documents culled from various registers of deeds, bank officers and the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR).

At the crux of the matter is that Corona hid properties and millions and millions of pesos in bank deposits by not declaring them in his SALNs. Such is not a matter of “mere inadvertence” because one doesn’t just forget purchasing pricey condominiums and/or depositing millions of pesos in banks when it comes to declaring them in SALNs.

—BARRY AGUILA,[email protected]