A Palace official on Wednesday flatly denied that President Rodrigo Duterte had something to do with the impeachment raps filed against Supreme Court Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno.
“That is not true… The President never even interfered with the affairs of the Cabinet, what more outside the Cabinet?,” chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo said in a news briefing Wednesday.
Pressed for an answer on whether or not Duterte wants the chief justice impeached, Panelo insisted that the President is not interested on the chief justice’s ouster.
“He doesn’t want to interfere, it doesn’t matter to him,” he said. “So it goes without saying it doesn’t matter to him, bahala kayo, kanya-kanyang diskarte ‘yan.”
Panelo, however, reminded that any impeachment is a “numbers game.”
Lawyer Lorenzo Gadon had filed the impeachment complaint against Sereno for betrayal of public trust and violation of the 1987 Constitution.
The committee on justice of Congress declared Gadon’s sufficient in form and substance.
The President, in previous occasions, hinted that he was displeased with a jet-setting government official who apparently enjoyed luxurious travel accommodations.
While Duterte did not identify the official, who he said flew first class and slept in hotel suites when going abroad —many believed that he was referring to Sereno.
On Monday, Sereno submitted her reply to the impeachment complaint filed against her and accused the House of Representatives of “abuse of power,” saying it was exercising its impeachment power “without sufficient legal and factual basis.”
In an 85-page answer to the impeachment complaint filed by Gadon, Sereno called for its dismissal as the charge was not based on “authentic records” but “conflated hearsay derived from news reports.”
Carlo Cruz, Sereno’s lawyer-spokesman, said Sereno’s reply to Congress maintained that the “charges in [Lorenzo] Gadon’s complaint are utterly baseless because it is based not on authentic records, much less personal knowledge of the complainant, but on conflated hearsay derived from news reports.”
Sereno’s camp added that the allegations against her were all ‘fake news.’