The more things change

HARBIN – Hollow blocks for house walls are stuffed with paper. There’s a huge racket in the illegal entry of aliens. A small, little known company bags a major computerization deal in government. A fountain in a government hospital is repaired, over and over, every budget cycle.

Sound familiar?

Depressingly so. Such schemes for corruption have been mentioned in ongoing investigations on the public works mess.

Those schemes I mentioned, however, were disclosed over two decades ago in congressional investigations.

I was reminded of them by the person who condemned them in privilege speeches when she was a senator, Nikki Coseteng.

For the first time in about a decade, I’m back in China. I thought I’d enjoy my visit in this “Ice City” as a tourist in the Ice and Snow Festival, but my chats with Coseteng reminded me of corruption scandals in the past. And disappointments in the past, over the failure to hold anyone accountable.

Coseteng reminded me that when she was a senator, the Board of Airline Representatives even submitted to her a list of over 100 Bureau of Immigration employees who charged their representation expenses to the airlines. BAR members said they went along with the scheme to avoid BI harassment, but the extortion became brazen.

Apart from the act itself being illegal, the BI employees also presented receipts for meals that clearly never happened. An employee, for example, would present receipts showing him having lunch or dinner on the same day at different restaurants in different places around the country.

Coseteng said many of the so-called immigration agents turned out to be security personnel. She no longer remembers if anyone got punished. There was also no punishment for the big fish in a housing scam that she denounced in 2000.

In the years when Coseteng served as senator, and several years after, so many corruption scandals erupted that I have forgotten some of them, including the ghost meals and ghost fountain repairs.

There was the Centennial Expo scam in 1998, the TOPWEB scam, the North Rail overpricing scandal, the ZTE-NBN broadband deal, and the Manila Bay reclamation project awarded by the Public Estates Authority to Amari Coastal Bay Development Corp., described by a senator as “the mother of all scams.”

Who got punished?

Incidentally, when the senator who denounced the PEA-Amari deal was still a Manila councilor, he was also described as “so young, yet so corrupt” by then Manila mayor Arsenio Lacson.

It’s not unusual in our country’s sad history that today’s accusers become tomorrow’s defendants in corruption scandals. Or the accused manages to rise to high elective office.

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Since I am back in the land of my maternal grandparents, I will mention in particular two projects with Chinese involvement that became mired in allegations of corruption.

In the North Rail scandal, state-owned China National Machinery and Equipment Group reportedly complained that most of the $150 million advanced for the contract was eaten up by bribes to Philippine officials, with not a single kilometer of railway built. CNMEG opted out of the contract.

In the NBN-ZTE broadband deal, the only one who went to prison was one of the whistleblowers, Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada – for another corruption mess unrelated to the broadband deal, and involving his brother Jose Orlando. After three years in Bilibid, the brothers were paroled and released in July last year.

Before the NBN-ZTE scandal, there was TOPWEB – the effort to computerize The Office of the President Web in 1996.

In the Centennial Expo scam, then ombudsman Aniano Desierto drew flak for clearing former president Fidel Ramos and saying the buck stopped with the chairman of the National Centennial Commission, former vice president Salvador Laurel. The graft case was still crawling through the judicial mill when Laurel died in 2004, before he could prove his avowed innocence.

Several of the other big fish linked to those scandals galore that I have mentioned have also passed away.

Death is not supposed to spare the corrupt from punishment, but government prosecutors have a poor record in going after the estate of deceased thieves. This allows the relatives to enjoy the fruits of looting, and breeds impunity.

Many other big fish were cleared, either because the evidence was genuinely insufficient to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt, or thanks to the best justice that money can buy.

Or (we can’t discount it, you nasty folks) maybe the big fish were truly innocent.

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The possibility that the big fish will again manage to escape accountability weighs heavily on everyone’s mind as the Senate Blue Ribbon committee resumes its probe this week into the flood control mess.

It helps that the Blue Ribbon is chaired by Panfilo Lacson, who because of his background has an easier time tapping law enforcement agencies for assistance in a congressional inquiry. Having been burned by a so-called star witness in the past, Lacson also knows the importance of not relying too much on human testimony for building a case.

We have to see though if a Senate probe led by a no-nonsense senator with an upright reputation will help net the big fish and send them to prison.

Richard Gordon also conducted a thorough probe when he chaired the Blue Ribbon in the previous administration, but look how his inquiry on the Pharmally scandal ended up.

Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla is giving the Pharmally case a second look. Let’s see if the review will lead to blind justice being rendered, with no sacred cows spared.

The developments in recent weeks on the public works corruption scandal have not been encouraging. But the year is just starting. Perhaps we’ll yet see genuine winds of change blowing.