Monday, August 04, 2008 Seares: Delaying the deco lamps case By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
MOST everyone, including media, hasn’t accurately named the article in the Asean summit scandal in Cebu.
Decorative lamp? Lamp post? Actually, it’s both, as cost for each unit covers lamp and post.
Whatever, most people believe the lamps and posts were hugely overpriced.
It’s “immoderate greed” or gluttony, one of the sins that send the sinner to John Bromyard’s hell known also as dominican hell.
It is, I’m told, a deep lake at whose bottom the gluttons lie on beds made of nails and spikes. For each body, there’s a narrow pit, filled with pitch and sulphur. Anthony Masters in his book “The Devil’s Dominion”’ (2006) says inmates are regularly forced to embrace each other and as they do, they burn.
Those accused of overpicing are far from any hell yet, the requisites being (a) they’re guilty and (b) they’re dead.
Let’s stick then to earthly justice. Penalties against the crooks are jail term, fine, and bar to public office. But the system is
often defective, slow, and corrupt.
Even an open-and-shut case needs time to move along.
Ages
It took ages at the ombudsman and now that it’s in court, prosecutors want to withdraw it from Sandiganbayan and reinvestigate.
Not that they don’t have a strong case, they say, they just want to fortify it with COA findings.
Just tuck the COA report into the files, suggests a Sandiganbayn justice.
Why not indeed? Unless they don’t care if people suspect that justice is being derailed and may set some accused free.
Yet, the gluttons might land in hell. But to the living who are furious about the large-scale corruption, that offers tiny comfort.
