EDITORIAL – A blow to the campaign against graft

Until this week only a handful of people knew there was an undersecretary for ecclesiastical and media affairs. The office where the underse-cretary worked, according to his immediate superior Conrado Limcaoco, had been effectively abolished last month, when Limcaoco was appointed by President Arroyo as her Cabinet officer for provincial events. Nevertheless, Malacañang announced that Limcaoco’s suddenly controversial undersecretary, Nolan Sison, had been fired by President Arroyo, although Palace officials could not say exactly when this happened. Limcaoco, for his part, clarified that Sison had in fact resigned last Saturday from an office that no longer existed.

Filipinos would not have bothered with this typical confusion in the nation’s seat of power, except for one recent development: Sison and his predecessor as undersecretary, Tim Orbos, were accused by the secretary of transportation and communications of trying to extort P1 million from officials of his department. Se-cretary Leandro Mendoza not only issued a detailed press statement about the alleged extortion; he also said he had video footage from a surveillance camera to prove his accusations.

Sison and Orbos have denied the accusations; both will have their day in court. But the story has dealt a blow to the campaign against corruption, feeble as it already is. People remember that Mendoza is a former national police chief whose forte was criminal investigation. The common perception is that he had to be pretty sure of his claims to go public with a story about an alleged shakedown attempt by a Malacañang undersecretary and several journalists.

Sison purportedly presented himself as a member of a presidential team assisting in the anti-corruption campaign through lifestyle checks on government officials. Those checks have been controversial enough, with those affected likening the investigations to a witch-hunt. People desperate for action against corruption, however, have been heartened by the results of the lifestyle checks, which have led to the dismissal or suspension of several ranking public officials.

The scandal involving Sison can only provide fodder to those who say that the lifestyle checks are prone to abuse and can quickly become instruments of harassment. Malacañang’s befuddled response has hardly been reassuring, raising questions about the direction the anti-graft campaign is going.