Just do it

The announcement by Renato Corona’s lawyers that he would finally take the stand at his impeachment trial has been described as a “bombshell development” and a “point of no return” for the embattled Chief Justice. The reflexive effort to reach for the dramatic turn of phrase in characterizing the defense’s surprise move, which came at the closing minutes of last Wednesday’s session, is understandable—and perhaps exactly what Corona’s lawyers had aimed for.

There was, after all, much by way of sworn revelations that afternoon from which they needed to turn the people’s attention. The lawyers presented two witnesses who they had hoped would buttress their position that the ownership of Basa-Guidote Enterprises Inc. by the Chief Justice’s wife, Cristina Corona, was sound and aboveboard, despite the epic feud her takeover of the company had triggered among her other family members. And, further, that BGEI had the capacity to extend an P11-million loan to the Chief Justice, an item he had declared in his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth.

An open-and-shut proposition, the lawyers might have thought. But what came out was a bonanza of revelations that proved damaging, or at the very least supremely unflattering, to their prized client. First, Cristina Corona’s apparent bad faith came to the fore in the testimony of Lucita Cristi, clerk of court of Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 216, who said that in October 2002, Cristina Corona, had moved for the execution of the libel conviction of her uncle Jose Ma. Basa III despite her being aware of his demise in August of the same year.

That bad faith would transform into something even worse when she maneuvered in 2003 to have BGEI’s 4,839 shares, representing 91 percent of the company, auctioned off and eventually sold to her own daughter, Carla Corona-Castillo, for P28,000. Sold for a song, as it were, because at the time, the company had P34.7 million in the bank from the sale of a property to the city government of Manila two years earlier.

As the sordid details came tumbling out, defense lawyers Serafin Cuevas and Jose Roy III tried to stanch the damage by raising one objection after another to the probing by a prosecution that appeared to have done its homework this time. Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile mostly shot down their protests and, at one point, retorted quite tellingly: “We want to know if there is machination involved in this.”

“Machination” was the right word. The picture that emerged from the unexpectedly revelatory testimony was of a family steeped in intrigue and subterfuge, able to take advantage of the labyrinthine intricacies of the legal system for its private ends, in ways that flirted with irregularity and suspicious behavior. A couple of senators just had to connect the dots in their minds and ask the question: Was Corona already in government service at the time this was happening? Yes. He was an associate justice of the Supreme Court, among the most powerful figures in the judiciary as his wife was expertly hopping from court to court, and invariably winning, in her drive to solidify ownership of BGEI.

If this were an ordinary family, the deceptions and manipulations evident in the story would be enough to cast an ethical cloud on the main characters. But that this relates directly to the Chief Justice, someone expected to be beyond reproach in his public and private lives, raises the stakes dramatically. Are we to believe, as Corona’s lawyers would like us to, that Cristina Corona’s disturbing machinations were unknown to her husband, even as that husband would eventually end up profiting from them through a multimillion-peso credit line?

Perhaps it was in realizing how such testimony had injured him that the Chief Justice decided he needed to be personally heard at last. But his lawyer Ramon Esguerra put it a bit differently: “We need to conclude sooner or later. So we realized that we should confront the issues and try not to dodge them anymore.” Take note of that statement—practically an admission that all this time, the defense has been dodging the issues, the most consequential of which remains Corona’s still-undisclosed dollar accounts.

Those deposits, like his court testimony, have been the subject of Corona’s repeated promises long ago. Now he has again declared, with high drama, that he will take the stand. We’re not holding our breath until we actually see him do it.