ALLIES of the Aquino administration have turned the Senate blue ribbon subcommittee hearings into a “political witch hunt” to ruin the reputation of Vice President Jejomar Binay because of his consistent performance in presidential surveys, Binay’s camp said on Monday.
“The Senate Blue Ribbon Sub-Committee would be resuming the longest running investigation against Vice President Jejomar C. Binay that has clearly evolved into a witch hunt in order to bolster the ambitions of presidential aspirants sorely lagging behind in the surveys,” said lawyer Rico Quicho, Binay’s political spokesperson.
“The next hearings would likely end up with the same results as that of the last 18 hearings, which produced nothing but mere conclusions of fact signifying nothing,” Quicho said a day ahead of the resumption of the hearings against Binay.
Quicho said it will be the 19th hearing in what has been described by former Senator Joker Arroyo as the longest-running investigation in the history of the Senate although the probes did not produce any evidence but only unsubstantiated claims.
“In a desperate attempt to swing sympathy, the resource persons of Senator Antonio Trillanes presented two residents of the resettlement project in Calauan, who vainly tried to discredit the project of the Vice President by misrepresenting and twisting the real situation in the said housing project,” he said.
But these people were later identified as rabid supporters of former vice mayor Ernesto Mercado and their claims were also denied by most of the people resettled in the area.
“It is quite evident that the detractors of Vice President Binay are hell bent to sow further intrigues and employ the use of government instrumentalities in order to cover-up for their own ineptness and malfeasance in office,” he said.
Quicho cited Trillanes’s supposed defense of Globe Asiatique owner Delfin Lee and claimed the senator’s efforts to clear Lee from the charges related to the GA scam was a “clear disregard and disrespect” for the justice system and the separation of powers of the three branches of the government.
“Trillanes is trying to diminish the efforts of the government to rid the housing sector of corruption, when President Aquino himself had fully supported the filing of the case against Lee and the subsequent manhunt for him,” he said
“Senator Trillanes’ blatant attempt to absolve Mr. Delfin Lee from any wrongdoing despite the pendency of his case before the Regional Trial Court of San Fernando, Pampanga is the latest proof of his clear bias against the Vice President,” he said.
Meanwhile, OVP media affairs spokesperson Joey Salgado claimed that Trillanes is trying in vain to discredit another good project of the Vice President.
In his text message, Salgado said Binay was an incorporator of the joint venture between STI and the University of Makati (UMak) in his capacity as mayor and chair of UMak’s Board of Trustees.
Salgado also claimed that the Vice President did not receive any shares or remuneration from UMak joint venture, but the joint venture produced hundreds of graduates in nursing and related fields with a passing rate of 70 to 77 percent in licensure examinations.