Thursday, January 06, 2005

Blood money

Blood money


Updated 02:15am (Mla time) Jan 06, 2005
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the January 6, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


CASH-STRAPPED Malacañang lofted a trial balloon for a fire sale of sequestered 27 percent of San Miguel Corp. stocks. The baratillo proposal followed the anti-graft court's ruling upholding two earlier decisions declaring that the coconut levies used to snap up SMC and United Coconut Planters Bank shares were taxes, not Marcos cronies' slush fund.

"The Sandiganbayan decision...should further strengthen our fiscal position," said Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye. But he "did not elaborate on how and when government planned to sell the SMC shares," Inquirer's Gil Cabacungan wrote.

Instead, Bunye dove for the nearest bunker. Expletives erupted after this hint about the Palace dipping into the levy. This is, after all, blood money. Martial law edicts extorted them from helpless coconut farmers. Indeed, "there's much law at the end of a bayonet."

Assassins ambushed former Vice President Emmanuel Pelaez, who was among the first to assail the levy. "It was the communists," shrugged the dictator. Ferdinand Marcos crafted Presidential Decree 276 to Executive Order 828. These enabled a cabal to milk hybrid seedlings and copra mills and have a monopoly of coconut oil exports.

Like Robert Mugabe's brutal rule in today's Zimbabwe, the Marcos regime "turned deaf to the sighs of orphans and drank the tears of children." In a blunt 1996 open letter, Ricardo Cardinal Vidal and 95 other religious and civic leaders wrote: "Levies were taxes imposed on farmers through abuse of state power... These are public funds owned by the Filipino people [but] it is claimed and controlled by Marcos cronies."

By then, the levy had ballooned to P100 billion. Men have killed for 30 pieces of silver. Thus, the Estrada administration scrambled to ensure the cronies' grip on the levy.

"Estrada's shoddy Ultimo Adios [were] Executive Orders 313 and 315," the Cebu Daily News noted in a Jan. 22, 2003 editorial. "Issued shortly before People Power 2 yanked him from Malacañang, these midnight directives insisted the coco levy were private funds.

"Erap dumped levy funds on the laps of the 'moneybag' aristocracy while invoking the name of impoverished theft victims. The grossest betrayals are always masked by a kiss."

Under Chief Justice Hilario Davide, the courts shattered the gridlock of 800-plus feet-dragging motions, lodged over 17 years by Marcos cronies to hang on to the blood money. Levies were public funds, the Supreme Court ruled.

In reaction, Cojuangco's Nationalist People's Coalition's "Brat Pack" in Congress tried to impeach a magistrate who sought to end the gorging.

The Sandiganbayan's First Division buttressed further the Supreme Court's ruling by upholding two landmark decisions that forfeited, in favor of the government, "coco levy-funded shares that cronies of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos acquired in SMC and UCPB," Volt Contreras reported.

In decisions penned by Presiding Justice Teresita Leonardo-de Castro, the court junked reconsideration motions filed by Cojuangco and his co-claimants, the Philippine Coconut Federation (Cocofed) and martial law overseer and now Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile.

Associate Justices Diosdado Peralta and Francisco Villaruz concurred with the Sandiganbayan's earlier ruling. The defendants must prove the levies "became legitimately private funds," the court said, but they failed to do so. Instead, they rehashed old arguments which the court had trashed earlier. "It's high time that...coconut farmers who contributed to it, and the entire industry, be given a chance to reap the benefits due them."

In their no-nonsense May 2004 ruling, De Castro and associates awarded to the government the 27-percent block of prime SMC shares. In July 2003, the court forfeited 72.2 percent of UCPB's outstanding stocks in favor of the government. "The shares are ordered reconveyed," De Castro wrote then.

These forthright decisions uncorked a flood of suggestions on how levy funds could be used to rehabilitate an industry pummeled into sunset status by the massive plunder of unrepentant cronies. Even Johnnys-come-lately in radical Left fronts (often a cubby-hole with computer and fax machine) churn out press releases on the issue.

The method is a valid issue for national debate. Among ideas circulating is that of a permanent trust fund, drawing only on the interest, to underwrite programs. This long-term method was examined when World War II Japanese reparations were in the pipeline. That, too, was blood money. But the piranhas got there first. And corruption dissipated the use of reparation.

Our track record with trust funds is not gilt-edged. A Marcos apparatchik in mufti, Erap never grasped the concept of accountability. Under President Fidel Ramos, the Armed Forces Modernization Fund disappeared without a trace, leaving soldiers with worn-out boots, shoddy uniforms and tin helmets.

As bill collectors snap at her heels, President Macapagal-Arroyo toys with the idea of a levy assets' fire sale. That'd be theft, the second time around, of powerless farmers' blood money. To turn "deaf to the sighs of orphans and drink the tears of children" demands a strong stomach.

Will the President beat off the temptation to snitch by yielding? Her shoddy reappointments to the Commission on Elections raise doubts. But that's the demon of skepticism which the President, who prayed with pastors, said should be exorcised. Get thee behind me, Satan.