Lawmakers to Erap on corruption: Look who’s talking

Look who’s talking.

This was the reaction of two congressmen to ousted President Joseph Estrada’s criticism of corruption under the Arroyo administration. The disgraced leader has alleged that corruption under President Arroyo is worse than during his short-lived watch.

House Majority Leader Prospero Nograles and Davao Rep. Douglas Cagas said yesterday Estrada should look at his record before criticizing his successor.

"Erap should stop talking about corruption in the country. The negative international perception is precisely because of him and the country is paying the price for it. He had his chance to run the country but he blew it big-time," Nograles said.

For his part, Cagas said the former president "has no moral authority to pontificate about corruption since he is the one facing plunder charges."

"He is just riding on the Hong Kong survey to grab the limelight again," he said.

He was referring to the survey of 900 foreign businessmen in Asia conducted by Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd. (PERC), which ranked the Philippines as the second most corrupt nation after Indonesia.

The respondents said they were not sure whether corruption under Mrs. Arroyo was worse than during the Estrada administration. They were sure, however, that corruption remained endemic despite the change in leadership in January 2001.

Nograles and Cagas reminded Estrada that he fell from power in the wake of a corruption scandal.

"There was ‘jueteng-gate’ and the Dante Tan stock manipulation scam," they recalled, referring to accusations that the ousted president received hundreds of millions in jueteng or illegal gambling money and to the stock market fraud involving Estrada’s businessman friend.

Tan was the majority shareholder of BW Resources, a gaming firm with stock worth less than P2 per share before it was manipulated. At the height of the manipulation, it rose to about P100 per share before it collapsed, dragging with it the entire stock market.