Accused, accusers mock asset records law

Our latest report looks at patterns of compliance by our public officials with provisions of the Constitution and anti-graft laws requiring the full and prompt disclosure of their Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth or SALN.

By the records of the PCIJ in securing SALNs since 2006, the sorry picture that emerges is one of rank non-compliance — or creative defiance of the law — not just by the justices of the Supreme Court from 1992, but also by the members of the 15th Congress, the executives of the constitutional commissions, the Office of the Vice President, and the star-rank officers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police, among others.

And yet, in one of the eight articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, the 188 members of the House of Representatives who signed the complaint censured him for refusing to disclose his SALN.

By their act, the House members raised a virtual Sword of Damocles over those in public office who insist on keeping the full details of their SALNs secret.

But the House accusers could well be accused of a similar omission, and culpable violation of the Constitution and anti-graft laws.

The PCIJ’s records from 2006 to December 2011 reveal a pattern of non-disclosure of SALNs by senior officials from all the branches of the government, except for the Senate. Most exemplary in its compliance with the law, the Senate has consistently disclosed copies of the asset records of all its members over the last decades, including that of those who will now sit as judges in Corona’s impeachment trial.

Yet still, defiance of the SALN law has been shown as well by the Office of the Ombudsman under Aquino appointee Conchita Carpio-Morales, a retired Supreme Court associate justice who became Ombudsman in July 2011. Her office has rebuffed an omnibus request that the PCIJ filed in September 2011 to secure the SALNs of officials that many agencies had denied since 2006.

Carpio-Morales’s office to this day also insists on the rule that SALN requests have to be subscribed and sworn to before a prosecutor of the Ombudsman’s office, according to a controversial memorandum circular issued by her impeached predecessor Merceditas Gutierrez.

If one’s failure to disclose SALNs is now an impeachable offense, then a long list of officials should also now be expunged from public office, including Ombudsman Carpio-Morales and by their own assertion, even 185 of the 188 members of the 15th Congress who filed the impeachment complaint against Corona but have not disclosed copies of their own SALNs.

Thus far, only two of the 282 members of the 15th Congress have actually disclosed copies of their 2010 SALN upon request: Mohammed Hussein P. Pangandaman (Lanao del Sur) and Maximo B. Rodriguez Jr. (PL-Abante Mindanao). Neither is among the 188 signatories to the impeachment complaint that the House had submitted to the Senate impeachment court.

The PCIJ was able to obtain the 2010 SALNs of five more members of the Lower House, including three who had signed the impeachment complaint against Corona. But that was only because their SALNs seem to have been mixed inadvertently with the asset records of the members of the 14th Congress that PCIJ was allowed to photocopy early this year.

Here is our latest story.