No personal knowledge of P5-M check — Estrada

Distancing himself from earlier assertions, President Estrada said yesterday he had no direct personal knowledge that an American consultant working for him accepted a P5-million check from his accuser in his impeachment trial.

Mr. Estrada told reporters he did not know for sure if his hired publicist Paul Bograd had accepted the check from Ilocos Sur Gov. Luis Singson, adding his knowledge of the check was not first-hand.

"I don’t know whether it’s true or not. I just said someone tipped me off about it but I am not saying that I know anything about it," the President said of the Associated Press report.

Mr. Estrada said he only "heard" about the money given by Singson to an unspe-cified party, and that he did not witness the transaction himself. Nor did he say when the handover took place or when he learned about it.

According to the President, the AP story written by its Manila bureau chief David Thurber put a curious spin to his mentioning that he had a tip about a multimillion-peso bribe.

"That’s wrong again. I said there was a tip given me. I did not say I admitted it. Somebody told me, somebody tipped me, there was P5 million there. Somebody only told me but I never admitted to anything," the President explained.

In the AP story datelined Manila the other day, Thurber wrote that the President had admitted that Bograd, a former public relations consultant, deposited the money in a personal bank account without knowing it came from proceeds of jueteng.

Mr. Estrada said Bograd may have used the money that Singson handed in 1999 to finance opinion polls, according to the story.

This was after Singson testified in the impeachment trial that sometime in February 1999, he issued the P5 million check to the President on top of regular remittances from jueteng operations in Luzon every 15th of the month.

But the President told AP that Bograd "didn’t know it came from jueteng. There’s nothing wrong with that."

Interviewed at the Puerto Princesa City airport before his flight back to Manila yesterday, Mr. Estrada expressed disgust over the "twist" AP put to the interview he granted Thurber shortly before the bureau chief was to assume the news agency’s Vietnam posting.

"I don’t even know if it is true or not. Look how this was twisted. It’s on record, isn’t it? There was only somebody who tipped me that someone said that. But I did not say I know about it," the President rued.

A Palace source said the President made only casual remarks about the ongoing impeachment trial to Thurber, a long-time acquaintance, during the interview Friday noon at the presidential residence at Malacañang.

When there are no official appointments, the Palace official requesting anonymity said, the President watches the impeachment trial on TV where Singson testified for the third time before the Senate tribunal.

Mr. Estrada reiterated that the truth will be known in due time, "so let us just leave these matters to our impeachment court. Those checks were not given to me."

Singson, an estranged gambling and drinking buddy of the President, had accused him of receiving more than P500 million in jueteng money and tobacco tax kickback.

But Mr. Estrada maintained he was innocent. "I did not accept a single centavo that came from any kind of illegal gambling. My conscience is clear, I have nothing to hide from our people," he said.

Leyte Rep. Apostol, one of the 11 House prosecutors, said no amount of buck-passing can diminish the President’s culpability in the jueteng scandal, and that "the burden of proof is now with the defense to show evidence that there was no bribery."

Apostol said they were not discounting the possibility of summoning Mr. Estrada to the impeachment proceedings, because "the President is a very good witness for the prosecution... every time he opens his mouth he reveals a lot of things."

He said the President has yet to outgrow his penchant for passing the buck, when everyone knows where the buck stops.

"Trace and evaluate the life of the President. Every time somebody criticizes him he throws fault to the other person. In fact his favorite hitting ball is former President (Fidel) Ramos," Apostol added.

The receipt of the P5 million check by Bograd from Singson was not the first alleged admission by Mr. Estrada that jueteng money was channeled into Palace coffers. Last November, he admitted before a foreign media group that the governor gave P200 million to a Muslim scholarship foundation.

On the other hand, the militant labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) urged the Senate yesterday to subpoena all the low-ranking employees in Malacañang to enable them to determine whether Singson and presidential friend Atong Ang were regular visitors at the Palace.

KMU chairman Crispin Beltran said like Singson who is keeping a ledger on jueteng collections, "there are also signature sheets recording these presidential visits." – With reports from Cecille Suerte Felipe, Jose Rodel Clapano