Familiarity trap

Janet Lim Napoles is high in our list of conversational topics in North America. Residents of Vancouver, Texas and San Francisco are looking at me, perplexed, wondering how a woman could get away with so much. Weren't there control measures in place? Post audit requirements? Check and balance? Evidence?  I swim in quicksand, as I face the difficult task of explaining Philippine corruption, how it can so very easily exist in our society, and the pervasiveness of it.

Yes, the pervasiveness of it. The massive extent of it.  How you find it in Customs, the Department of Public Works and Highways, the tax authorities, the judiciary, the cops, and the prison system.  And pretty much almost everything else.

How do you explain the mess to people who aren't Filipinos, or even if they are, they happen to be professionals who left the country in their 20's, never ran a business or stood on their own, whose only brush with corruption might have been to pay a traffic cop the fine for beating the red light and not asked for a receipt, in exchange for not getting a ticket?

Even as I scan the report on Napoles' 2001 case for the supply of Kevlar helmets to the military, where the government brought malversation and falsification charges because the helmets never arrived until their absence was discovered, and when they finally showed up, they weren't up to specs, and the approval for which were broken down into smaller amounts so only a lower authority's signature need be obtained, corruption reverberates.

I see a trail of evidence leading to her very own bank account.  One big order, split into fourteen smaller purchase orders.  Full payment was made, even without delivery.  The winning bidders were companies headed by her relatives, with non-existent addresses.  All the checks were deposited into her account at the same time.  And yet she wasn't convicted.  Westerners can't quite fathom the result.

How did this happen?  Surely there must have been a very good reason why she was acquitted.  The news site Rappler reports that the criminal court cleared Napoles by saying that "she was not one of the dealer-payees in the transaction" and on this basis, "her participation as a private individual becomes remote."  Therefore, "even if she owns the bank account where the 14 checks were later deposited, this does not in itself translate to her conspiracy in the crime charged in the information absent evidence of an overt act on her part."

Even I cannot wrap my head around this reasoning.  So she got the funds that were embezzled, and then? What happened?  Did not the court think that was peculiar?  And knowing she received the funds and they were parked at one point in her account, shouldn't that have led to probing questions on the disposition of that government money?

Simple questions like, where did the funds go?  Did Napoles keep the money?   What happened when she withdrew it?  Did she spend it?  On what?  All these questions might have led the court to a quite different conclusion.

But this is the peculiar nature of our judicial system, when strong facts like these can still lead to acquittals.  This might help explain to outsiders why our system is so screwed up the way it is.  Fraudsters, embezzlers, and corrupt souls know there is a very big chance they can get away with it.  They know the odds of making a fast buck without getting caught are very, very good.

And so they are emboldened, twisting the system, taking advantage of greed and poverty, and splashing bribes around.  Spread the moolah, implicate more and more, and cast a wider network.  And so we have it, the perfect recipe for a 10-billion scam, involving the highest officers of the land.

It's gotten to the point where we are no longer astonished by these occurrences. We know they are happening, somewhere in the belly of the government beast.  My Western friends are certainly displaying much higher levels of amazement, of incredulity, of bewilderment.  I, on the other hand, seem to be more practical.

Let's just hope, despite this certainty, the almost expectation we will find cans and cans of worms in government, that we still get outraged when we hear stories like this.  That we don't fall into ennui.

Sometimes, I am afraid we are near that point already.