DESPITE a warning from the Senate, the House is bent on issuing a show cause order against Senator Leila de Lima to censure her for urging a witness in a congressional investigation to go into hiding to avoid testifying about the illegal drug trade inside the New Bilibid Prison.
In an interview over radio dzBB Sunday, House Deputy Speaker Fredenil Castro said De Lima needed to be censured for seeking to prevent her former lover and driver Ronnie Dayan from testifying before the House committee on justice, which is investigating the proliferation of illegal drugs inside the national penitentiary when she was still Justice secretary.
Earlier, Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez tagged De Lima as “a serial liar” for continuing to deny she had anything to do with the proliferation of drugs inside the NBP when so many inmates had already testified that they gave her millions in drug money to fund her senatorial campaign.
Alvarez noted that while there were conflicting testimonies of witnesses in the investigation of the House committee on justice, they all had a common thread pointing to involvement of De Lima.
He added that self-confessed drug lord Kerwin Espinosa and Dayan corroborated each other.
Dayan also admitted delivering drug money to De Lima, he said.
Despite De Lima’s denials, Alvarez added, he was confident the public was intelligent enough to discern who was telling the truth or lying.
Castro, meanwhile, said he did not see a head-on collision with the Senate over De Lima.
While Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III warned the House that it was violating inter-chamber parliamentary courtesy, Castro said De Lima violated House rules by ignoring the summons to attend its hearings.
“It has been established that the illegal drug trade proliferated in the NBP during her stint as justice secretary. Senator De Lima has a lot to answer to. She was also accused of receiving drug money for her senatorial campaign,” Castro told dzBB.
If De Lima continued to ignore the show cause order, Castro said the senator would be cited for contempt.
“If she is cited in contempt, she would face the same fate as Dayan, who was arrested to compel his presence in the hearing. But I believe the House and Senate leadership would discuss how to handle the case of the senator,” he said.
“De Lima is not above the law. No one is above the law. The way I see it, the House will stand by its authority to cite her for contempt,” Castro said.
Also on Sunday, Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II urged De Lima to stop raising the gender issue and instead answer the criminal charges against her in connection with her alleged involvement in the proliferation of illegal drugs in the NBP.
Aguirre said the issues against De Lima were criminal, and not about a woman in public service being attacked for her gender.
“She should drop the gender issue and just disprove the allegations against her in appropriate venues and stop beating around the bush,” Aguirre said.
De Lima, who was Justice secretary before joining the Senate, and other respondents have been summoned by the Justice department to its preliminary investigation on drug trafficking charges against them, which will start Friday, December 2.
Aguirre said De Lima has been raising gender by claiming that she is being attacked and publicly ridiculed by allies of her nemesis, President Rodrigo Duterte, over her admitted “frailties of a woman,” particularly her previous affair with her former driver to “get public sympathy.”
De Lima claimed that her right as a woman was violated when Dayan testified before the House of Representatives last week and was grilled by lawmakers on details of their seven-year affair.
“As a woman, it breaks my heart that my private life and personal relationship have become subject of the public and Congress’ ridicule,” De Lima said in a statement in reaction to Dayan’s testimony.
She has raised the same issue in her habeas data petition in the Supreme Court, alleging that the administration was violating the Magna Carta for women.
But Aguirre disputed this, arguing that the questions raised by lawmakers were valid and relevant to the subject of the probe.
“Lawmakers like Fred Castro and Harry Roque are very good lawyers. They are just establishing the deep relationship between De Lima and Dayan, that because of this relationship Dayan had enjoyed her trust, which strengthens our position that had De Lima not trusted Dayan, she could have not entrusted him to receive money from Kerwin Espinosa and other drug lords,” he said.
The line of questioning by the lawmakers was actually common in court trials, he added.
He said if De Lima feels violated that her womanhood and relationship with Dayan were covered, she had only herself to blame.
“She was the one who raised the issue of ‘frailties of woman’ in her TV interview where she admitted her affair with Dayan,” he said.
Aguirre earlier said tthe admission was a voluntary act of self-incrimination, and could be used to bolster allegations against her and Dayan.