Your friendly neighborhood poll chief

FOR a public official who is no less the head of the independent constitutional body tasked with safeguarding the sanctity of our elections, Benjamin Abalos Sr. seemingly continues to behave like the seasoned politician that he is.

Testifying for the first time at the Senate hearing yesterday on the controversial National Broadband Network (NBN) project, Abalos gave the public a glimpse of this persona when he admitted having close relationships with officials of the Zhong Xing Telecommunications Equipment Limited (ZTE), the Chinese firm that bagged the broadband contract.

He even disclosed that he serves as a gracious host every time his friends from ZTE are in the country. He defends his friendship with them, saying it has nothing to do with his official functions as chairman of the Commission on Elections (Comelec). “I do not know if in your life, you come across people you befriended. That’s how I came to know these people. I became friends with these people. I do not deny that. I have close relations with this people,” he claimed.

Listen to Abalos’s testimony at the Senate hearing yesterday.

That he has no qualms about befriending Chinese businessmen who are on the lookout for big-ticket undertakings with the government does suggest how Abalos is no “Mr. Collegiality” for nothing — a monicker he earned from a colleague in the ruling Lakas party who apparently found this a positive thing.

Even his accuser, Romulo Neri, the former National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) director-general, admitted how Abalos struck him as a very “charming and nice” man, in explaining why he agreed to meet twice and have golf with the Comelec chairman at the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club, where the alleged P200-million bribe offer took place.

Of course, this is not the first time Abalos had courted controversy for the friendly ties he nurtures, apparently unmindful of the conflict-of-interest situations that they pose on his status as a public official. Early in his stint as Comelec chair, he had considered renegotiating the tamper-proof voters’ ID system already struck down by the Supreme Court owing to an anomalous bidding process. The contract for the said project was awarded during the time of Bernardo Pardo in 2000 to Photokina Marketing Corporation.

In place of the junked Voter Registration and Information System (VRIS), Abalos had proposed a voter validation system which was actually a rehash of the former, with Photokina still part of the arrangement.

The Comelec chair, however, is a family friend of the Chuas, owners of Photokina, having served as their lawyer in the past and is a godfather of two of their children. Initially, Abalos even declared that he would inhibit himself from deciding on the controversy-ridden project out of “delicadeza.” (The P1-billion contract was eventually awarded to the French firm Sagem.)

It was also widely believed that Abalos’s unprecedented appointment to the Comelec was clinched because of his close ties with the Arroyos. It was no less First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo, a fellow golfing aficionado, who intimated to Abalos when they were in Shanghai in 2002 that he was being considered for the position.

By his own recollection, Abalos said that “Mike (Arroyo) talked to me and told me, ‘Would you consider if the President would consider you for the position of Comelec chairman?'”

It’s no wonder then that the supposed impartial Comelec remains a body that reeks of the politics of accommodation. Under a politician like Abalos, the poll body has only lamentably continued to be stacked with officials and staff endorsed by politicians.