By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
So much thunder and righteousness have come forth from the statements boldly read out in the Senate by the flood control contractor king and queen, Curlee and Sara Discaya, last Monday.
They named no less than 17 members of the House of Representatives as kickback monsters of big-time government infrastructure contracts snared by their companies as a result of rigged bidding and sweet dealings with their DPWH co-conspirators.
Their legally advised exposé was pulled out of the hat before the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearing into “ghost” flood control projects, with the hope that they would be called as state witnesses.
But by Tuesday, Curlee Discaya was singing a different tune. Abruptly and suspiciously, he cleared Speaker Martin Romualdez and Rep. Zaldy Co, insisting he had no “direct transaction” with them. Quite a turnaround for someone who just a day earlier implicated the most powerful of the lot. What happened?
Perhaps the Discayas realized that going all out against their “dirty allies” in Congress won’t save their necks. They’re not even assured of state witness protection, which requires one to be the least guilty. And how could they possibly qualify, when their hands are deep in the till? By their own admission, they paid out 30% cuts.
But here’s the deal: what about the “ghost” projects? That means they kept the rest, didn’t they? How does that make them the least guilty in this affair? The crime of leaving behind little more than slabs of concrete, half-finished structures, and, in some cases, missing works altogether expose the fact that these were nothing more than cash cow schemes.
Even their so-called evidence is flimsy: ledgers and unsigned waivers, documents that could easily be struck down in court as hearsay. That weakens their case, and their backtracking is weakened even further.
Equally telling, their “memory” of corruption begins only in 2022 — as if their decades-long empire of self-bidding through multiple dummy firms in cahoots with DPWH suddenly materialized with Marcos’s presidency. This selective recall smacks of concealment: of other names, other allies, other officials who surely enabled them long before.
Then, what if their real game is to mix the guilty with the innocent? Name-drop both plunderers and those with clean hands, sow enough confusion, then watch the whole affair collapse in a haze of doubt. If that’s the strategy, they are digging their own legal grave — unless, of course, the true masterminds in government already taught them the moves.
And this dragging of names and then shifting narratives and selective finger-pointing seem to be the same play of another cornered “singing bird” in the former Assistant 1st District Engineer in Bulacan, Brice Hernandez.
He has been detained by the Senate — now remanded to the custody of the police — for allegedly lying before the Blue Ribbon Committee, which had in its hands hard evidence contrary to his statements on his casinos rendezvous with four other DPWH officials using aliases and presumably faked government IDs.
Yes, the plot is a lot thicker than can be discussed in one sitting. But what I fear most is that at the end of this telenovela of dragging officials and elected leaders into the mud, the most guilty would walk free. And we — the people who had just been robbed right in front of our faces — would just be the pitiful victims of a charade.
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