Friday, August 12, 2005
2 poll execs rap retired general for bribery
MANILA -- Two election officers on Thursday filed charges against a retired general and his cohorts for coercing them into becoming witnesses of the opposition against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Ferdinand Gerardo and Gilbert Palogan, election officers in Pampanga, accompanied by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), filed bribery charges against retired General Julius Yarcia, his friend David Tan, and several others.
They also charged the retired police official with violating Presidential Decree (PD) 46 and Article 212 of the Revised Penal Code, which prohibit public officials from receiving gifts.
NBI Director for the National Capital Region (NCR) Edmund Arugay said they are still studying whether they would also file coercion charges against Yarcia, former election commissioner Ralph Lantion, and former Solicitor General Francisco Chavez.
"We will probably file additional charges against Yarcia but we still have to validate Gerardo's allegations that there was coercion," he said.
Gerardo and Palogan were among the witnesses to be supposedly presented by Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz in the ongoing Senate hearings on illegal gambling.
Gerardo claimed in a press conference Wednesday that Yarcia allegedly forced them at gunpoint in a Makati City hotel to sign untruthful statements alleging fraud in the last presidential elections.
Palogan supported Gerardo's allegations, saying Yarcia even offered them P5 million and US visas if they would corroborate the testimonies of jueteng witnesses Michaelangelo Zuce and Army Captain Marlon Mendoza.
The two opposition witnesses had claimed that jueteng funds were used to bribe Commission on Election officials to tilt the outcome of the May 2004 elections in President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's favor.
He said Yarcia tried to recruit them to also make a documentary report showing they have been ordered by the President to prepare election returns in exchange for payoffs. The documents, the complainants claimed, were supposed to be presented in the impeachment hearings.
"Si Yarcia talaga ang (It is Yarcia who is the) tactician dyan (there), siya ang nag-uutos sa amin (he was the one who ordered us)," Palogan said.
Gerardo, who refused to comment Thursday, earlier said Yarcia forced him to go with them at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel last July 26, where he was told to copy and sign a prepared statement of how they had been supposedly used in electoral fraud.
At Room 1435 of the same hotel, he said he found Lantion and Chavez, who allegedly gave him instructions to implicate certain individuals in electoral fraud.
The prepared statement recounted how he and other election officials of Pampanga were supposedly gathered by a Pampanga mayor for a meeting at the so-called "White House" in Pampanga, with President Arroyo, a few days before the May 10, 2004 elections.
The two complainants are now under the custody of the NBI after their respective requests for protection, upon learning that a group of men allegedly deployed by Yarcia has been monitoring their movements and lurking outside their residences. (ECV)
(August 12, 2005 issue)
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