Joc-Joc’s joke-joke

According to his lawyer, former Department of Agriculture undersecretary Jocelyn "Joc-Joc" Bolante isn’t playing hide-and-seek with the Senate. It’s just that he’s really extremely busy, with so many previous commitments abroad.

Indeed, Joc-Joc claims, he was made to understand that the Senate hearings on the alleged fertilizer fund scam, including charges that the fertilizer funds were diverted to the 2004 electoral campaign, would be going into high gear in late January 2006. He has promised to be available at those hearings scheduled in the third week of January.

The Senate didn’t buy that line. At last Tuesday’s hearing, it was revealed that Joc-Joc had again left for abroad last Monday evening, despite having received a Senate summons at his Ayala Alabang residence on December 6th. Whereupon, the Senate declared that it was fed up with Joc-Joc’s tendency to fly the coop just when his presence is required. The Senate forthwith declared Mr. Bolante in contempt and ordered his arrest and detention in the office of the Senate sergeant-at-arms.

When the Bureau of Immigration was asked why it allowed Joc-Joc to fly out of the country despite at least two unheeded summonses served upon him by the Senate (a third was allegedly never received), the Bureau responded, quite correctly, that there was never any hold-order issued against Bolante by any court or other competent authority.

The BI has a good point. Unless there is a legal basis to prevent Mr. Bolante from leaving the country, there is no valid reason to curtail his freedom of locomotion. And boy, does he locomote (pardon my murder of the English language)! Even his lawyer professes lack of knowledge about how many times he left the country last year. All he knows, he claims, is that since Mr. Bolante left the service of the government, he seems to have had numerous engagements abroad, not necessarily limited to Rotary matters. Hmm, that’s interesting. Perhaps life-style investigators should stop and talk a while to some of his Ayala Alabang neighbors.

On the other hand, Joc-Joc is widely known as one of the authentic "professional" Rotarians in this country. You know, the kind that’s been everything from Club President to District Governor to International Director, to prospective Rotary International President. If Joc-Joc weathers this storm he’s in, being an International President would be an undeniably sterling achievement, as well as a distinct honor for the country.

He’s also known to be one of those perennial members of Rotary delegations from the Philippines in international conventions, wherever in the world such conventions are held. I am convinced that if it’s Rotary business Joc-Joc is focusing on in his post-government afterlife, then he really must have a lot of those "important long-standing commitments" to fulfill.

As an International Director and, I understand, Treasurer (please contain your mirth), Mr. Bolante would have duties enough to break the backs of less hardy souls. Not only would he have administrative work at Evanston, Illinois at Rotary headquarters, he would have to serve as the "President’s Personal Representative" in District conventions all over the world.

The President customarily has to send proxies to attend these conventions, because there are not enough days in the year to allow him to personally visit each of the thousands of such conventions that are held every year all over the world.

But, you might ask, what would such a busy person do for a living? A good question, my dear Sherlock. That’s the reason one has to be a financially secure retiree, or the heir of a wealthy forebear, or a purposeful individual who has made all necessary "preparations" for the job, if you get my drift, to even think of landing it.

If only for the grueling work and travel schedule the office entails, one would not be able to practice a profession or attend adequately to a business enterprise.

Whether or not these considerations are relevant to certain ugly rumors remains to be seen. There is, for instance, loose talk about his residential property whose metes and bounds would allegedly reduce any local business titan to tears, and his purported fondness for pricey European sports cars with Italian-sounding names evocative of Tuscan wine and international car racing championships.

The argument is that since Joc-Joc is no longer in government service, he may be beyond the pale of Malacanang’s life-style checkers. That merely means that if anyone makes an issue of it, he may eventually have to deal with erstwhile buddy and freshly-minted Ombudsman, or Ombudsperson, Mercy Gutierrez.

However, his being an ex-government official is also cited by the Senate as basis for his not being able to cite E.O. 464 to justify his absence. Not that he has claimed refuge under that E.O. Neither is there any indication, so far, that he has run to the Palace to ask for such refuge. In this crisis, it would seem, he’s on his own, despite the unkind innuendo about who ultimately benefited from this apparent rape of the fertilizer fund.

The only way the Senate can keep Joc-Joc from fulfilling his other important obligations abroad is to take the unprecedented step of asking Rotary International to temporarily excuse him from the fulfillment of the duties his exalted position in the organization imposes upon him.

It is not likely, nor would it be fair at this stage of the inquiry, to ask that a hold order be issued prohibiting Bolante from traveling abroad. The Senate should just sit down with Joc-Joc and/or his attorney and work out a firm schedule of hearings at which the star witness will undertake to be present, come hell or high water. Forget those contempt citations and threats of confinement at the office of the Senate sergeant-at-arms. It didn’t work with Bert Gonzales, it won’t work with Joc-Joc.

The bottom line is that, on the strength of his lawyer’s commitments and his own protestations that he is not "snubbing" the Senate hearings, the Senate’s agriculture committee should get going A.S.A.P. on the substantive questions on the fertilizer fund.

The first problem is to retrieve those documents explaining what the Farm Inputs and Farm Implements Program was all about and why it needed so much funding. Department of Agriculture officials claim the papers cannot be located. Joc-Joc says he didn’t take any documents with him when he left office. Maybe the papers took flight by themselves and are somewhere in the world attending a Rotary convention.