How many people know Gondelina Amata and Michael Lim Benjamin?
Amata is the former president of state-owned National Livelihood Development Corp. The now defunct NLDC was used to funnel funds from the P29.1-million pork barrel of Gregorio Honasan when he was a senator, under a crooked scheme that was supposedly designed by convicted scam queen Janet Lim Napoles.
Benjamin was Honasan’s chief of staff. Since 2022, Benjamin and Amata have been out on bail of P510,000 each. Yesterday, the Sandiganbayan’s Third Division sentenced both of them together with Napoles to imprisonment of up to 68 years for graft, malversation of public funds and malversation through falsification of public documents for the misuse of Honasan’s Priority Development Assistance Fund – the PDAF or pork barrel. Honasan did not face charges.
Those convicted were also ordered to pay P15 million each as fine, and to jointly pay the government another P15 million as civil liability.
Also yesterday, the same Third Division of the Sandiganbayan cleared former Senate president Juan Ponce Enrile, his former chief of staff Jessica Lucila ‘Gigi’ Reyes, Napoles and 30 other defendants of 15 counts of plunder and graft in connection with the misuse of Enrile’s PDAF allocations from 2004 to 2010.
Enrile was accused of receiving through Reyes a total of P172.83 million in kickbacks from Napoles.
Enrile was allowed to post bail by the Supreme Court in 2015 on ‘humanitarian grounds’ that cited his frail health and advanced age. But at 101, he’s young and hale enough to remain on the public payroll as the chief legal counsel of President Marcos.
The Sandiganbayan Third Division, consisting of Associate Justices Ronald Moreno, Arthur Malabaguio and Juliet Manalo-San Gaspar, imposed civil penalties, ordering a joint payment amounting to P338 million by Napoles and 15 of her co-defendants linked to her bogus non-government organization along with the PDAF conduits – NLDC, the National Agribusiness Corp. and Technology Resource Center. Enrile and Reyes were spared from this civil liability.
Whether the joint payment will ever be made remains to be seen. The nation is still waiting for the joint return to public coffers of P124.5 million arising from the PDAF plunder case filed against former senator Bong Revilla, his chief of staff Richard Cambe and Napoles.
Cambe was convicted but Revilla was cleared of criminal charges. Cambe died of a stroke in 2021 while serving a life sentence at the New Bilibid Prison.
All these cases should serve as a cautionary tale for the factotums of VIPs. If their bosses engage in thievery and get caught, the underlings are the ones who get thrown under the bus, and rot for life in Bilibid.