PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte will not meddle in the impeachment bid against Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, even though the complaint was filed by his allies.
“The President cannot control his allies who want to file a complaint,” Communications Assistant Secretary Ana Marie Paz Banaag said in a Palace news briefing.
“He would respect any person or any individual who would file any case against an impeachable officer and would not really meddle with it,” she added.
Banaag said it was better for the executive branch to refrain from commenting on the impeachment process as it is the business of the legislature, but said that the filing of complaints against Sereno “was within the bounds of the law.”
“The President respects the separation of powers of each of the agencies. If the House of Representatives will endorse [the complaint], that is up to them,” she said.
The anti-crime watchdog Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption filed an impeachment complaint against Sereno Wednesday. A lawyer, Lorenzo Gadon, was sent to file a second one.
House Majority Leader Rodolfo Fariñas, chairman of the committee on rules, said he told Gadon that his complaint must be based on his own personal knowledge or culled from authentic records, when the lawyer visited him at his office.
Gadon was supposed to file the second impeachment complaint Wednesday but held it back to give Fariñas time to read the 54-page document.
At a press conference last week, Gadon, president of the PDU30 Constitutional Reform to Federalism, said he planned to file a complaint against Sereno over the P5.1 million spent to buy a Toyota Land Cruiser for the Chief Justice.
“She used public funds to finance her extravagant and lavish lifestyle by ordering the purchase of a brand-new luxurious Toyota Land Cruiser 2017 model as her personal vehicle, amounting to more than P5 million,” Gadon said in his 54-page impeachment complaint.
Gadon also alleged that Sereno committed a culpable violation of the Constitution when she failed to truthfully disclose in her SALN the “exorbitant lawyer’s fees” of $745,000 or P37 million that she received from the government.
Gadon also accused Sereno of violating the Constitution when she manipulated the shortlist of the Judicial and Bar Council to exclude then Solicitor General Francis H. Jardeleza, for personal and political reasons, thereby disgracing… Jardeleza, and curtailing the President’s power to appoint him.”
Sereno also betrayed the public trust when she obstructed justice by prevailing upon a lower court judge not to issue a warrant of arrest against Senator Leila de Lima, who faced drug charges filed by the Justice department.
Sereno refused to comment on the impeachment complaints.
Fariñas said he would evaluate Gadon’s complaint the same way he did with the one filed against Duterte.
He said he noticed that some attachments were newspaper reports, and advised him instead to attach certified true copies of the Supreme Court orders or circulars that form the bases for his complaint.
He added that if the Supreme Court did not furnish him copies of the documents he required, the House committee on justice could subpoena them.