This week I attended an embassy reception, for the first time in months – not only because I like the ambassador, but also to find out if the Filipino party crowd had thinned since the flood control scandal erupted.
Sure enough, for the first time since I began attending such receptions ages ago, I didn’t spot any senator or prominent congressman in the crowd. No Cabinet secretary or well-known local government official either.
An analyst joked that no one wanted to be caught getting off a Mercedes Benz-Maybach S-Class backed by a security convoy of several identical black Benz SUVs. I actually spotted such a Benz fleet parked outside one house in Forbes Park just last week.
These days, folks avoid being seen strutting in Manolo Blahniks, holding a Hermes clutch while flashing a Patek Philippe wristwatch along with a huge Paraiba tourmaline ring.
If you can’t flaunt those ultra-luxe baubles at parties, why attend?
In the hotel basement parking area I spotted a Maserati and a Lexus. I wondered if those were among the luxury vehicles now being hunted down for seizure by the state.
All is not lost for the conspicuous consumers; they can still use their hard-stolen money to splurge on luxuries under the radar of the envious scrum. A public works employee, for example, has reportedly just plunked a cool P2 million in advance payment for dental implants.
But overall, the fun has been taken out of wealth flaunting by the obscenely rich.
This embarrassment over the ostentatious display of fantabulous wealth has descended on the country practically overnight.
It happened after the systematic looting of public coffers for personal purposes came to light, in the most public way, beginning with that privilege speech by Sen. Panfilo Lacson.
That kind of public shaming could not have happened if the offenses imputed on thieves had been kept under wraps, with the plunderers invoking presumption of innocence and presumption of regularity in their official acts.
This is another reason why public hearings are so important.
The bicameral conference in the previous 19th Congress has been dubbed the Chamber of Secrets, where magical things happened to the national budget that would put to shame Voldemort, the villain ‘who must not be named’ in the Harry Potter series.
It turns out that there were several Chambers of Secrets in the budget process, among them the House ‘small committee’ where no minutes were kept. The chair of the Senate finance committee at the time, Grace Poe, says she did not take part in any small committee for the budget. She did disclose that P26 billion was inserted for AKAP or the Ayuda sa Kapos ang Kita Program, with the Senate agreeing after P5 billion was allotted to its members and P21 billion went to the House.
Poe faced the Independent Commission for Infrastructure a week ago. But the ICI session with her was closed to the public, although she answered questions from the media afterward. The Discayas also faced the ICI and gave a ‘tell all, plus plus’ (as per the couple’s lawyer).
We may never know the full details of what Poe, the Discayas or sacked public works undersecretary Roberto Bernardo told the ICI. The commission is starting to be seen (unfairly, according to its defenders) as the latest addition to the Chambers of Secrets.
Another chamber is the Supreme Court, which did not bother holding oral arguments on a case so vital as the impeachment of the vice president of the republic. The SC, whose members probably believe they are indeed gods unaccountable to no one, were in such an admirable rush to resolve that case it even used among its premises for its decision a non-existent news report. Our country faces a plague of ghosts.
The record of the judiciary in resolving cases is one of the reasons why there is such dismay over the decision of the ICI to hold its hearings behind closed doors.
Defenders of the ICI want critics to give the commission a chance, saying its method is similar to Special Counsel investigations in the US. But all along, legal illiterates like me thought it would be patterned after the Philippines’ Agrava Fact-Finding Board on the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, whose hearings were open to the public. Perhaps President Marcos should have clarified this matter when he organized the ICI with the promise of promoting transparency.
The ICI wants the nation to wait for its findings to be known as the details are processed through the usual legal channels.
It’s a reasonable request, if only our legal system wasn’t in such a mess. Those who want ICI sessions to be opened to the public don’t want to wait for months or even years to find out how we lost trillions in tax money to thieves. As the cases crawl along at the usual glacial pace in the judicial mill, the looters will be demanding (as is their right) presumption of innocence. They will be working to unfreeze their assets to finance their legal battles, and possibly buy their way back to politics. They could employ delaying tactics in court, after which they can move to have the case dismissed for inordinate delay, or else claim advanced age and cognitive decline to end their prosecution.
As we have seen, that’s a ginormous amount of money we’re talking about here, which can be deployed for magical political comebacks.
The various Chambers of Secrets could be perceived, unfairly or not, to be complicit in this.
We can wait for the new minority in the Senate to present another witness, even without Lacson’s by-your-leave, against the guy Senator Chiz refers to as he who must not be named.
Escudero must also be a Harry Potter fan. He might want to amplify calls for open hearings by the ICI. But it can’t be a selective call, covering only he who must not be named. Open hearings will be the quickest way for Escudero to refute the accusations against him, hit back at his critics and bolster claims of innocence.
The gods of Padre Faura – and their retired colleague in the ICI – may want to take inspiration from God’s order: let there be light.