Wenceslao: The Corona gambit

Friday, February 10, 2012

DESPERATION is written all over the recent moves of Supreme Court (SC) Chief Justice Renato Corona and defense lawyers as the impeachment trial slowly but surely exposed what has been carefully hidden from public view for long. Corona has petitioned his own SC colleagues to essentially shield him from the proceedings in the Senate acting as impeachment court and to prevent further scrutiny of his bank accounts.

It looks like Corona and the defense see the Chief Justice’s bank account as a game-changer of sorts. And it is, if one considers the documents submitted by an executive of Philippine Savings Bank (PSB) that tended to show that Corona may have more money than what he has listed in his statement of assets and liabilities (SALN) annually.

It’s good that the High Court did not act (yet?) on Corona’s petition seeking to stop the impeachment trial altogether. What it issued instead was a temporary restraining order (TRO) sought by PSB against the Senate subpoena on Corona’s dollar accounts.

Informed about the TRO, the impeachment court didn’t tackle the matter yesterday.

Court Administrator Jose Midas Marquez said the TRO against the impeachment trial was not issued because no SC justice is in charge of it yet. The case was raffled to Justice Presbitero Velasco, who inhibited from it because his son is a member of the House of Representatives, which had impeached Corona.

But judging from the previous inaction of the High Court in tricky cases involving the impeachment trial, such a TRO may not be coming soon. Which is good because I don’t think the SC can compel the impeachment court to stop hearing Corona’s case. That TRO will surely be ignored by the Senate and the SC can’t order law enforcement agencies under the executive branch to implement it.

It is actually unfair for Corona to drag the other members of the SC into a battle that he should have waged on his own. But this is expected because from the very beginning, the Chief Justice has used the judiciary as an institution to stymie the impeachment process. He refuses to go on leave even if the impeachment trial has obviously affected him.

Corona has vowed to fight to the end. But his sense of country should make him realize that it is wrong to drag everyone into the brink of a constitutional crisis just so he can escape the impeachment process. Besides, the recalcitrance isn’t bringing him anywhere personally. His respectability has suffered a hit and it will continue to plunge as more information about him surfaces.

He should quit while his image, while already tainted, is still intact.

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If this is of interest to those following the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona, here’s how the justices voted on the PSB petition to prevent the impeachment court from opening the Chief Justice’s dollar accounts (the SC voted 8-5 with two abstentions).

Voting in favor of the TRO: Associate Justices Teresita Leonardo de Castro, Arturo Brion, Roberto Abad, Jose Perez, Lucas Bersamin, Martin Villarama, Bienvenido Reyes and Jose Mendoza. Voting against the issuance of TRO: Associate Justices Antonio Carpio, Diosdado Peralta, Ma. Lourdes Sereno, Estela Perlas Bernabe and Mariano del Castillo. Corona and Velasco inhibited.

(khanwens@yahoo.com)