Just token purge?

Even as fresh revelations about the pork barrel scam tumble out every day and implicate more and more of the country’s ruling political class, the unfinished business of corruption cases uncovered earlier continues to fester in the country’s court system—unresolved, tangled up in legalistic maneuvers, and, too often, eventually forgotten. And since nothing is resolved with dispatch and transparency, the public’s cynicism is only buttressed at what seems like the occasional token purging by the country’s elite of its ranks, the more grasping but less slippery of them thrown to the docket while the rest continue on their merry way.

Last week’s inside news, for instance, that the Sandiganbayan has issued a notice of garnishment against some P55.59-million worth of bank accounts and assets believed to have been unlawfully acquired by Lt. Gen. Jacinto Ligot and his family barely caused a ripple. Remember Ligot? He was the comptroller of the Armed Forces of the Philippines from July 1999 to March 2001, a virtually unknown bureaucrat in the chain of command until his name exploded in the headlines over news that his family had a slew of properties in the Philippines and in the United States that could not have been bought with his monthly salary of P35,000 when he retired in 2004.

The immense wealth the Ligots were subsequently said to have owned—they had at least P740 million deposited in various dollar and peso bank accounts from 2001 to 2005, with one Citibank account alone holding $1.6 million at one point; eight houses in the United States were also traced to Ligot’s wife Erlinda—boggled the public imagination. If the military’s cashier, in effect, could amass this much unexplained wealth, how much more his higher-ups?

The rank corruption in the military was bared for all when retired Col. George Rabusa, who served as budget chief of the AFP deputy chief of staff from November 1999 to 2002, testified before the Senate that rampant misappropriations amounting to billions of pesos was routine among the military brass. Retired and incoming chiefs of staff were given multi-million peso “pabaon” and “pasalubong” (sendoff and welcome gifts), with at least P10 million more set aside as monthly “support” to the Office of the AFP chief.

Rabusa’s revelations bolstered the allegations already leveled at this time against two former military comptrollers: Ligot, in hot water for some P135.28 million in unexplained wealth; and Gen. Carlos Garcia, who replaced Ligot as AFP comptroller and was himself found to have hoarded some P303.2-million bank deposits plus properties overseas. Garcia’s secret wealth only became known when his sons were caught at a US airport trying to sneak in an undeclared $10,000 in cash in December 2003; it wasn’t even the first time they had brought in huge amounts of dollars to the United States. Among the many properties of Ligot’s wife Erlinda, meanwhile, were a P22-million condominium unit in Essensa East Forbes at Global City, Taguig, and and 8-hectare poultry farm with a rest house in Bukidnon.

Rabusa eventually filed charges of plunder against three former Armed Forces chiefs, 14 other top-ranking military officials and five civilians in connection with the fund misuse in the AFP. Those cases, however, went nowhere. Last April, the Ombudsman dismissed all the charges, citing the lack of “competent evidence” from Rabusa, whose allegations were “unproven” and the result of “faulty and unreasonable computation.” Left unanswered by the ruling, though, was the basic question: If the paper trail that Rabusa presented failed to show their guilt, how did Ligot, Garcia et al. still end up with their lavish, by now well-documented wealth?

Not only did Ligot beat the plunder rap; he scored another victory when the Supreme Court nullified the freeze on P54 million of his unexplained money, citing the impairment of his constitutional rights. The next best tack has been to charge him with perjury for his vastly underreported statements of assets, liabilities and net worth while in office. He’s out on bail on that charge.

The Sandiganbayan’s recent ruling to secure P55.59 million of Ligot’s accounts and assets go a modest way toward extracting restitution from a man who, from all indications, milked his public office for all that it was worth. But it’s crucial not to forget that he wasn’t even the top banana in his organization; if he was able to pilfer this much in a mere three years as AFP comptroller, think how much more his superiors and enablers must have earned—and are still. When will they get their reckoning?