Wednesday, May 07, 2008 Talk back: Columnist mentioned me twice in 2 weeks By Efrain T. Pelaez Jr.
I AM not sure what I have done to merit mention in Frank Malilong’s column twice in two weeks.
First, he offered his unnecessary explanation about a suspicious vehicle following me and the complaint I made with the Mabolo police, duly blottered and under investigation.
What made his comments inappropriate is that he is the lawyer of the vehicle owner who is under investigation.
An opinion writer featured in the editorial pages of Sun.Star should, as a matter of professional ethics, refrain from using his column for lawyering purposes.
This is a settled principle and editorial policy that I thought Sun.Star adheres to.
Security
The case is still under investigation and since this a serious matter involving my personal security and that of my family, he should not have trivialized the circumstances under which the vehicle was identified.
As everyone knows, I have filed very serious criminal cases against officials of Lapu-Lapu City.
For sometime now, we have been under police protection and surveillance by some agencies.
The fact that the suspicious vehicle is registered under the name of someone with the same family name as Paz Corro Radaza, wife of the Lapu-Lapu city mayor, is no laughing matter.
Moreover, since Malilong was the one who accompanied the registered owner of the vehicle during the police investigation
as counsel, I would assume that he would not use his column to weave a story or make his defense.
He could have done that in court.
Are we to assume that he is now one of the new apologists of Radaza and Co.?
Cardinal
About a week later, Malilong mentioned in his column a meeting between His Eminence Ricardo Cardinal Vidal and Mayor Boy Radaza, accompanied by his lawyer Dick Sison.
Since he was not there at the meeting, he was of course stating facts based on hearsay.
He also paid glowing tribute to the trial skills of his friend, Sison, who I assume was the biased source of the information.
Only Sison would believe that the Cardinal would swallow his story hook, line and sinker.
What Malilong did not mention was that the Cardinal had written the Ombudsman to inquire about four very important cases in December 2007.
Would you believe of the four cases, three of them involve the Radazas?
They are the lampposts and Asean expenses scam, the computer scam, and the Girl Scout scam involving Paz Radaza.
Naturally, Sison would not mention this to his friend.
Moreover, Sison failed to answer why those scams involving hundreds of millions of pesos were happening in Lapu-Lapu under Radaza’s watch.
If indeed the cardinal remarked that Sison is “a good lawyer,” I suppose it would have been his appreciation for the legal smokescreen and incredible yarn he had so eloquently delivered.
As usual, all thunder—but no lightning!
Computers
The good cardinal would have preferred a simple explanation as to why 18 of Radaza’s most trusted lieutenants including himself would hurriedly buy 470 cloned Celeron computers at P49,500 each when everyone else in this country knows that the real price is P17,000 only, especially since they were using pirated software.
I would also imagine that Malilong, like Cardinal Vidal, would want to know why a lamppost worth P8,000 should sell for P85,000, or why Paz Radaza was instrumental in withdrawing P25 million of Girl Scout funds in her own celebrated case.
Now, that indeed, would be journalism---not lawyering—and worthy of a Sun.Star editorial feature.
Frank M. Malilong responds:
On April 13, I wrote about the case of a worried Efrain Pelaez Jr. who had to seek police help to investigate the presence of
a vehicle that he saw suspiciously parked near his residence and allegedly trailing him.
On April 24, I mentioned his name in passing when I wrote about the criminal case that the Ombudsman filed against his enemy, Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Arturo Radaza.
In both instances, I identified him as a businessman.
In both cases, he did not react.
On April 28, I wrote to the police, referring to him as “a certain Efrain Pelaez Jr.”
A couple of days later, he fired off a scathing letter to the Sun.Star editor, accusing me of being unethical and of being an apologist for Radaza. Coincidence?
Policy
Pelaez claims that I violated a Sun.Star “settled principle and editorial policy” against “using his column for lawyering purposes,” apparently in reference to my April 13 column.
I suggest that he read it again, this time with a clean heart.
That piece was about him and his legitimate concern for his safety.
I wrote that one couldn’t afford to be too trusting these days by way of explaining why Pelaez reported to the police the presence of a Ford Everest near his Maria Luisa Estate residence at least twice in March.
I added that “Pelaez was obviously worried that whoever was in, or sent, the car might have been out to harm him.”
I sympathized with him because it was not fair that someone should live in fear for standing up for what he believes is right.
The mention of the side of the vehicle owner was necessary because it formed an integral part of a very good human
interest story.
Here was someone naturally fearful for his safety seeing a threat in something that turns out to be nothing more than the case of a village visitor straying into the self-declared no-parking zone of the former.
As I narrated to the police and in my column, the “offending” Everest was in Maria Luisa, driven by the owner’s teenage son, who was visiting his elementary school classmates.
Was I lawyering?
I went to the police alone (not with the vehicle owner as Pelaez falsely asserted) because the owner’s husband, who is like a brother to me, asked if I had friends in the Cebu City Police Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Branch and if I could inquire from them what the invitation that his wife received from them late the previous night was about.
The last time I read the Revised Penal Code, it is not a felony to park your car near the residence of a threatened VIP.
So why would there have been need for a lawyer?
Just because my name appears in the Roll of Attorneys, can I not intercede for a friend without being engaged in “lawyering”?
Pelaez claims that I ‘trivialized the circumstances under which the vehicle was identified.” But how?
I merely gave the side of the other party involved.
Laughing matter
Secondly, if as Pelaez insinuates, the Radazas and the Corros are out to get him, would they be stupid enough to use a vehicle that is registered to a Corro to carry the assassin or to case his house?
And why, of all places, in Maria Luisa where security measures are so strict, a visitor cannot gain entry unless he leaves his driver’s license at the guardhouse and until his vehicle’s plate number is recorded in the logbook?
And Pelaez complains that it is I who is making the whole thing a laughing matter!
Sison
Pelaez also accused me of being an apologist for Mayor Radaza because of another column in which I praised the courtroom skills of the mayor’s lawyer, Dick Sison.
He said that my account of the meeting of Radaza and Sison with Cardinal Vidal was based on hearsay, probably coming from Sison.
Sison did in fact mention that they were able to talk to the cardinal when we met in a courtroom in Sogod, Southern Leyte early in January but only in passing.
I got the details two months later from a source, who was also present during the meeting but I did not write about it until Radaza was charged before the Sandiganbayan.
Then, I found it relevant to mention if Sison would have as much success with the Sandiganbayan as he had with the cardinal.
A friend once observed that it is easier to extract a tooth from a hungry crocodile than to elicit praise from a lawyer for a colleague.
I should have followed what he said.
For praising the trial skills of Sison, I am now labeled as an apologist for his client.
But coming from someone who sees a conspiracy behind every tainted glass window and who refuses to see the truth (that there is no such threat) even if he bumps into it, I am not at all surprised.
