Just sue them

You expose wrongdoing because you want the perpetrator punished.

In our country, the road to punishment requires filing a case in court. If it’s related to graft and corruption, a complaint can be filed with either the Office of the Ombudsman or the Department of Justice.

If prosecutors see probable cause for the complaint, it’s forwarded to the courts for trial.

What’s the objective of the 18 self-proclaimed bagmen who say they delivered billions in cold cash as kickbacks and payoffs to top government officials and even a priest?

Those officials can’t be ousted without cause and due process. Do the 18 want the personalities they have implicated punished through legal processes? Simply shamed? Executed by tokhang?

Whichever bloc in the Senate handles the Blue Ribbon, that committee can only go so far in any investigation. If the objective is imprisonment of crooks after conviction, any Blue Ribbon report will still have to be forwarded to the ombudsman for formal preliminary investigation to determine if the case warrants filing in court.

Eventually, the final arbiter of the truth will be the legal system – state prosecutors and the courts.

If lawyer Levi Baligod and former congressman Michael Defensor want accountability, justice and punishment for crime, formal complaints must be filed against the politicians who have been accused by the 18 of large-scale corruption related to flood control and budget anomalies.

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The only person mentioned by the 18 who will be spared will be President Marcos, who is immune from prosecution, but only until noon of June 30, 2028. He can be removed only by impeachment, but the House of Representatives overwhelmingly threw out the first impeachment complaint against him recently.

The Duterte forces can try to impeach BBM again after the one-year prohibition lapses next year. Are the accusations of the 18 “bagmen” meant to lay the groundwork for this?

Impeachment when general elections are just over a year away is unlikely to gain traction. It produces too much instability, and between President Marcos and the beneficiary of his removal from office, BBM is still the lesser evil. In this sense, he sure picked the right running mate in 2022.

Also, any new attempt to impeach BBM will need public support to sway his allies in the House. For this, those 18 mostly former soldiers and their handlers must first get their act together, providing consistency in their narratives.

Instead, each time the 18 are made to face the public, key details in their stories change, depending on where the political winds blow.

Their appearance last week before the six senators led by siblings Alan Peter and Pia Cayetano along with Rodante Marcoleta cannot be passed off as a hearing, since there was no one to conduct a genuine grilling, to question all those inconsistencies. The senators came off merely helping the 18 (at some point, it looked like coaching) present their stories.

For their second appearance at the Senate last Monday, it was no hearing but a press conference, to explain the holes in their first storytelling session.

Those 18 and their handlers don’t want to face real questioning. All they want is to tell their story within a controlled environment. They should just post all their accusations on social media – unless they also don’t want to receive comments online about their inconsistent narratives.

Without filing their complaints before the proper forum for criminal prosecution, their stories mainly smack of propaganda, disinformation and even destabilization. And, for some of their political handlers, an attempt to get back at those who are pursuing them for criminal prosecution.

The Dutertes cast a long shadow over all this turbulence. Coming up are the forthcoming trial of former president Rodrigo Duterte before the International Criminal Court, the impeachment trial of his daughter the Vice President, and the arrest of their minions who carried out the brutal war on drugs.

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As I have written, when it comes to corruption, there are Filipinos – and not just DDS – who are ready to believe the worst about BBM, his family, his ex-favorite cousin Martin Romualdez and the gang of budget thieves.

But the cases must be airtight so that the charges will stick. The biggest looters in this country have enormous resources for legal warfare and will not go down without a fight.

In preparing a case, Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla wants the evidence not only to establish probable cause, but to provide reasonable certainty of conviction.

If cases against powerful looters are prepared haphazardly, we might just see all charges being thrown out again, like the wealth forfeiture cases against the Marcoses that have been junked by the Sandiganbayan one after the other under BBM’s watch, with the last one dismissed only last week.

We don’t even know if we can ever get back the estate tax that the Marcos heirs have been ordered to pay by the Bureau of Internal Revenue way back in 1997. The original amount of P23 billion has ballooned to P203 billion due to penalties, interests and surcharges. BBM was the administrator of the estate.

The 18 and their handlers will likely say they don’t trust Remulla to accept their complaints. But they won’t know unless they try.

Remulla has questioned the proceedings at the Senate, pointing out that he has already received the partial report on the flood control and budget mess from the Blue Ribbon under Panfilo Lacson.

The ombudsman has also announced that Romualdez is likely to face indictment for money laundering, plunder and malversation through falsification of public documents, which is a non-bailable offense that can warrant life in prison.

Instead of shifting narratives, people should help provide incontrovertible evidence that the ombudsman and the courts can’t afford to ignore.

Unless the objective is something other than criminal prosecution and punishment of the corrupt, the 18 must file a formal complaint against those they are accusing of large-scale looting. Sue the thieves, forthwith.