Vice President Jejomar Binay’s tirade against the Liberal Party (LP) may have all but confirmed his break from the Aquino administration, which declared the past week that it is up to him to resign from the Cabinet.
The tirade stemmed from the arrest warrants issued on 14 aides and advisors for their failure to attend the Senate blue ribbon committee hearings despite repeated invitations.
The more than year-long inquiry into the scale of corruption allegedly committed by the vice president during his tenure as Makati City mayor, specifically in the construction of the multi-billion-peso Makati City Hall Building II, is supposed to wind down by next month.
Only someone naive would discount the obvious political motivation behind the committee hearings. Prior to that, of course, the vice president was acknowledged as the leading contender for the 2016 presidency.
But a lot has happened since then, including the latest disclosure by the Anti-Money Laundering Council that P600 million had been deposited in the accounts of Binay’s alleged dummies in a single day.
With the AMLC’s petition to the Court of Appeals to freeze all 242 accounts, joint or otherwise, of Binay, his family and his associates still pending, the pressure must be weighing heavily on the vice president enough for him to issue the combative response. Even his daughter, Makati City Rep. Abigail Binay, joined her sister and Sen. Nancy Binay in taking up the cudgels for him.
Still, the actual amounts involved, which Binay’s lawyers want to keep under wraps for reasons of confidentiality, can be both numbing and mind-boggling to Filipinos, majority of whom have to feed on scraps and leftovers scrounged from garbage cans outside fast-food outlets and whose children they send out to the streets to beg for food under their watchful eye.
Granted that he served in public office for 30 years and, maybe even had a lucrative law practice before that, even Binay’s unchallenged tenure as perhaps Makati City’s longest-serving mayor can hardly justify the hundreds of millions, even billions of pesos that he supposedly has in his accounts.
The AMLC petition may or may not set a dangerous legal precedent in as far as bank secrecy laws are concerned, but despite Binay’s protestations of innocence, even he knows that anyone who wishes to run for president will be grilled not only in the courts of law but in the court of public opinion, of which the Senate is but one of the venues.
Unlike US boxing champ Floyd Mayweather Jr. who danced, hugged and counter-punched his way to victory over People’s Champ Manny Pacquiao, Binay can ill-afford to dance away from the charges leveled at him.
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