KASAUP

At Large
The persecution of Dennis Villa-Ignacio

By Rina Jimenez-DavidPhilippine Daily InquirerFirst Posted 01:23:00 03/03/2009Filed Under:

No wonder Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez can’t do her job. She’s so busy answering her critics and neutralizing potential threats.

One of these threats happens to be Special Prosecutor Dennis Villa-Ignacio, whom she has not only virtually marooned in a limbo of responsibility (all the cases he used to handle have been re-assigned to other lawyers), but also gone after with a flurry of charges that range from the ridiculous to the petty.

The first salvo fired against Villa-Ignacio were charges that he had technically malversed funds when he channeled the budget earmarked for his office’s Christmas party to a charitable cause, a Gawad Kalinga project. The decision to make more practical use of the party budget happened to have been made from a consensus of the entire office, but Villa-Ignacio’s accusers say the decision to donate it to GK was made without their consent.

I thought at the time that deputy ombudsmen, who called a press conference to air the charges, had better things to do than besmirch a civil servant’s decades-long service with accusations of malversing Christmas party funds. But it seems Gutierrez’s proxy warriors weren’t through yet with Villa-Ignacio.

Most recently, another press conference was called in which all the deputy ombudsmen “urged” Villa-Ignacio to resign before his term comes to an end (next year) since he apparently was no longer interested in doing his job and had not been reporting for work.

When I asked Villa-Ignacio about this, he replied that not only is he rightfully entitled to leave credits, he also has no practical need to report for work since Gutierrez has taken all responsibility from him. “One of these days, I won’t be surprised if I report for work and find that my desk and chair had been taken away.”

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At this point, let me say that I am writing from a not-so-objective point of view. The Villa-Ignacios and my family have been neighbors for over two decades in the same gated village. In fact we served simultaneously on the board of directors of our homeowners association in the early years, when Villa-Ignacio was an “ordinary” prosecutor known to everyone in the neighborhood as “fiscal.”

But in fairness to both of us, this is the first time I am writing about him. Not even at the height of the plunder trial of former President Joseph Estrada, where Villa-Ignacio led the prosecution team, was I ever tempted to wangle an exclusive from him. Nor did he ever approach me to do a profile or even offer a few words of encouragement. I think it was precisely because we are cordial neighbors that we respected each other’s boundaries. In fact, this column was inspired by a long lunch we shared in Tagaytay City the other weekend, in the course of looking over a personal project of Villa-Ignacio and his children. Oh, the stories he could tell!

Dennis says he knows what — or who — is behind all this pressure to make him leave his post before his retirement. He is set to retire in 2010, but before then all the cases before the Ombudsman for corruption and plunder that involve or could involve certain top officials and their kin have to be resolved in their favor. Or else some people’s plans for a cushy retirement would be in peril.

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These officials know that with Villa-Ignacio as special prosecutor charged with shepherding all the cases brought to the Ombudsman through trial at the anti-graft court Sandiganbayan, once a case is deemed fit for trial, Villa-Ignacio will go at it with the tenacity of a pit bull.
He is famous for crossing swords with Rene Saguisag, who was on Jose Estrada’s defense team, in an argument that descended into a personal clash. This, Villa-Ignacio says today, he deeply regrets because he respects, and was even inspired by, Saguisag the human rights lawyer and the man.

Villa-Ignacio was part of a prosecution team that the members had dubbed the “Fellowship of the Ring,” after the band of hobbits, an elf, a dwarf, a wizened wizard and noblemen made famous in the Tolkien trilogy. The prize at the end of the group’s trek was not the destruction of a ring that rules them all, but the prosecution of a corrupt former president. So you can imagine how Villa-Ignacio felt, after securing Estrada’s conviction on plunder charges, when the former president was pardoned, on the very day, as he tells it, he was set to appear before the Sandiganbayan to appeal for the garnishment of certain properties.

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At present, Ombudsman Gutierrez faces several challenges. She has yet to explain satisfactorily why she didn’t take any action on the World Bank report disclosing corruption and collusion in the bidding for several infrastructure projects, in which the First Gentleman was implicated by at least one witness.

She has yet to act on the recommendation of the Senate blue ribbon committee to conduct further investigation of and prosecute former undersecretary of agriculture Jocelyn Bolante and other officials and individuals in the billion-peso fertilizer fund scam.

And she has yet to act on the many leads uncovered in the course of investigations into the NBN-ZTE deal, despite the heavy publicity and the direct testimony of many witnesses.

Gutierrez protests that she is “looking into” these cases, but that these aren’t the only ones her office has to deal with. One would think that with so many high-profile and indeed controversial cases on her plate — too many, she says, than she has time to attend to — Gutierrez would welcome the assistance of someone with a proven capacity for hard work and successful prosecution. Instead, she chooses to waste her and her associates’ time going after a respected colleague.

One wonders not just at Merceditas Gutierrez’s sense of priorities, but even her sense of proportion.