Hole of Justice: Evil he can only be!

Hole of Justice: Evil he can only be!: Hole of Justice by Peter G. Jimenea The Interloper ...

Hole of Justice: Evil he can only be!

Hole of Justice: Evil he can only be!: Hole of Justice by Peter G. Jimenea The Interloper ...

Hole of Justice: Evil he can only be!

Hole of Justice: Evil he can only be!: Hole of Justice by Peter G. Jimenea The Interloper ...

Evil he can only be!

Hole of Justice

by Peter G. Jimenea
 

The Interloper                                                                                

 

This is the case of the failed Iloilo City government housing project in the town of Pavia, Iloilo, costing P137M for the construction of 413 low-cost houses of poor city hall employees. It is a story that won’t easily go away.

It started in 2001 during the first term of Atty. Jerry Trenas, as elected mayor of Iloilo City. It ended in 2009, also his last term in office as mayor without even a finished unit out of the 413 houses supposed to be constructed.

Thus, a case was filed against him and the few others at the Ombudsman Office in Quezon City in 2004.  But Ombudsman Monalisa, ehe, este Omb. Merceditas Gutierrez let it slept at her office until she resigned in 2010.

Overall Deputy Ombudsman Orlando Casimiro in a hurry to take Gutierrez’ place, resolved to indict former Mayor Mansueto Malabor who only signed the contract but allowed Trenas to scot free despite his spending almost all the money for that failed project.

Casimiro delegated the task to Deputy Ombudsman for Visayas Pelagio Apostol to further probe the involvement of Mayor Trenas when both deputies are not blind to those unauthorized payments embraced in RA 3019 for Violation of the Anti Graft and Corrupt Practices Act.

Looking for probable cause in the involvement of Mayor Trenas, Casimiro tasked it to Apostol on August 2010. To date, however, no probable cause to indict the former mayor as they are still separating the chaff from the grains by numbers.

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Probable cause needs only to rest on evidence showing that more likely than not, a crime has been committed. The contractor abandoned the project, yet, Trenas continued paying his bills in millions. Here, even a high school student believes an offense charged has been committed.

This creates an impression without affirming the perception that the resolution of Casimiro to indict Mansueto M only without Jerry T and Apostol’s runaround of the Housing case to date were all done in exchange for – you know what!

Injustice lies fairly in “delayed” decision than “erroneous” that can be appealed immediately. These Ombudsman’s deputies should know that it is only for them and the moneyed-crooks that what they did was good!

They only reinforced the widespread public belief that the Ombudsman’s Iloilo Office is ran by officials with Alzheimer disease. Or maybe, because we failed to secure a guarantee that when Gutierrez steps down all crooks will go with her.

Lowly employees of the Office of the Ombudsman are most sorely tempted to steal but don’t, what a shame for superiors. This is the problem in government office with officials that easily yield to temptation of greed!

Somebody told me that Deputy Ombudsman Apostol cannot freely decide on all cases in his office due to the intercession of a powerful member of Pres. Pinoy’s administration. Evil that man could only be in this injustice-en-masse.’

Perhaps Deputy Ombudsman for the Visayas Apostol should resign to save his soul. He should know that what is somewhat missing in that interloper’s life is to die with dignity. The intercession is injustice to thousands of taxpayers and a crime that cries to God for vengeance!

We agree the Court has prerogative to relax procedural rules of even the most mandatory character. It has also discretion to dismiss a case or not as a power - not duty. Litigation, however, is not a game of technicalities but of merits.

This column is an inconvenient place for conducting judicial business. But I did my part as a journalist. God doesn’t sleep and He knows; qui peccat ebrius luat sobrius– he who offends when drunk shall be punished when sober. Sooner or later, sinners will pay!

The New Mafia

Hole of Justice

By Peter G. Jimenea

The New Mafia

Hong Kong, is Britain’s colony for hundreds of years. China’s Ch’ing dynasty ceded it to the British as war reparation after the poorly-equipped Chinese army lost the battle dubbed as “the Opium Wars” against the powerful British fleet at the Canton dock in 1859.

As written in the book Warlord of Crime, Hong Kong slowly became a big city where money is god. Vices developed in the colony lorded by different Chinese Triad gangs competing for supremacy in underworld business. Few have the faintest idea that the backbone of the Triads organization is drug.

During the 1800s, the European powers financed their colonial ambitions through the opium trade. The British who had established a government monopoly over the large poppy tracts in Northern India led the drive. They targeted China’s million of inhabitants as the principla market.

Britain mass-merchandised opium and became the first Western government to traffic in narcotics. It took the pervasive bureaucracy and persistent of the British to transform China into a nation of addicts to become the largest organized drug trafficker in history.

During the late 1800s, a new wave of colonialism took place. Europe divided the world into colonies, protectorates and spheres of influence. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia became French Indochina. Burma (now Myanmar) became British Burma, Thailand a British sphere of influence and a buffer separating the British and French empires.

Opium addiction then spread from China to Southeast Asia that between 1940 and 1955 a lot of Chinese residents in downtown Iloilo City were seen smoking opium. It spread to Europe and United States that by 1906, a worldwide anti-opium crusade was formed. In Britain, the House of Commons declared their government’s involvement immoral.

The British did not ban opium in Hong Kong until 1946, the House of Commons’ vote marked the end of its government control of the trade.  But China remained a nation of addicts. Opium was in grained into Chinese life. It is a social grace for the wealthy and a means of escape for the masses.

In 1911, a revolution overthrown the Imperial government and a republic was born under the leadership shared by Dr. Sun yat sen and Chinese Army Gen. Chiang kai shek. Their new government has worsened the problem. China ceased to be a unified country.

Autonomous regions are controlled by powerful military warlords. Having been riddled by corruption, the weak republican government failed to provide enforcement, thus, poppy cultivation and opium exports increased rapidly.

In Southeast Asia, the British and French opium monopolies created massive addict populations crucial to the post-World War II heroin epidemic. Britain successfully ingrained opium into China that Chinese merchants were the natural choice to run the monopoly of the trade in Southeast Asia.

In Thailand, the Britons forced the Thais to accept Chinese control of all underground vices. But like Burma, only Chinese are allowed to direct the opium trade. Now, should one still wonder today why Chinese nationals are as always, the “big catch” in government’s campaign against illegal drugs?

Honors change manner

Hole of Justice

by Peter G. Jimenea

Dies of Bullets

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) G-man Melvin Purvis also known as “Nervous Purvis” has twice arrested Roger “The Terrible” Touhy, the surviving rival of Al Capone in beer business. Once, he wrongly charged Touhy with a kidnapping perpetrated by the Barker-Karpis Gang and was exonerated.

But on the second arrest Purvis had Touhy convicted of kidnapping Jake “The Barber” Factor, Capone’s underworld business associate. It seems, however, that Purvis was set-up by Capone to ensure Touhy’s long term imprisonment.

The wicked Capone’s notoriety had been emboldened selling of alcohol in defiance of the silly and hated Prohibition Law. Hypocrisy is also noted in him by attending his victims’ funerals, pretending in grief and staying unshaven during the mourning period.

Capone’s war with “Bugs” Moran ended in 1929 when his gang-men 

perpetrated the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Disguised as raiding police officers, five Capone men wiped out five Moran toughies, a motor mechanic and an optometrist who just like to hang out with crooks.

Purvis spying of Capone played a big role in the latter’s downfall. Since 1930, Capone was targeted by Inland Revenue agents who disregarded his claim of no-income and proved he withheld declaration and evaded tax payments totaling millions.

Federal Judge Wilkerson outsmarted Capone’s mob who attempted to pervert the course of justice by substituting a brother Judge’s panel of jurymen for his own at the last minute. It is widely believed the replaced jurymen were bribed to acquit Capone. So, as a result, the new jurymen convicted Capone of tax evasion.

Purvis has also a bad reputation as FBI agent when he wildly injured two civilians and killed one in a gunfight with the John Dillinger’s mob at Little Bohemia, Wisconsin. But the arrest of Dillinger in 1934, reinstated him as the most daring G-man of the bureau.

It was his famous squeaky voice that prompted the gangster, Dillinger, to go for his guns when he called; “Stick ‘em up, Johnny, we’ve got you surrounded.” His personal courage was also demonstrated when he faced the guns of “Pretty Boy” Floyd, “Baby Faced” Nelson, Verne Sankey and Volney Davis.

The popularity of Purvis doesn’t sit well with the Bureau’s deskbound publicity-hungry Director J Edgar Hoover. Besides, Purvis was the only local FBI bureau chief who always started his press releases with; “Melvin Purvis announces…etc,” instead of “J Edgar Hoover announces…”

True, honors change manner. But due to the long-standing rift between him and his director, the FBI G-man resigned in 1935. Mr. Hoover, however, denied publicly that the cause of Purvis resignation was the rift between them. Such rift has certainly existed and the G-man’s memoirs of his time with the bureau never mentioned the name of his director.

The FBI G-man was the only bureau’s field agent to attract as much public attention as Bureau Director J Edgar Hoover. Purvis headed the Chicago Bureau in 1932, a high-profile operation because of Capones’s beer wars and the activities of the mid-western bank robbers like Dillinger and the Barber-Karpis Gang.

In the Second World War, he served with the Army War Crimes Office. Afterwards he practiced privately as a lawyer until the illness that led to his suicide. It was the gun he fired at Dillinger with which Purvis has killed himself at his home in South Carolina rather than endure slow and debilitating illness. As wise men say; “he who lives by the gun..… see the title!

The law of life

Hole of Justice

By Peter G. Jimenea

What he says about the law of life

French doctor Jerome Lejuene, a genetics specialist, once said that natural sciences and the science of law speak of the same language. Thus, when we see somebody healthy and well-built, we can surely say he has a robust constitution.

A country where every subject is protected by law has an equitable constitution. In writing a law, the science of law dictates that every term should be spelled out before it can be considered as one. And secondly, the information written in law should be enacted as it can never become a law unless it has been voted for.

In contrast to the Reproductive Health Bill, it says that life exactly does the same thing. The program and all its definition are written inside the chromosomes. The Chromosome is said to be the table of the law of life. If you get the right number of your table of the law, then begins your own life.

Voting process does exist as well in fertilization because there are a lot of proposals, many, many sperms but need only one to get in. That is the voting process which enacts the new constitution of a man. A new human being is defined because personal constitution is entirely spelled out. I hope it’s not true about mongoloids.

Most of the human beings have been conceived before the fertilization in vitro (test tube). Normally, when the ovum is ripe, that is once a month and fifteen days after the menses, there is a rupture of the follicle and the ovum is taken by the fallopian tube which has a special expansion where the egg will be laid.

Dr. Lejeune said the egg is a big cell, round, not mobile, floating quietly inside the fluid in the tube that carries the big cell towards the uterus by ciliate movements. The sperm is an indefatigable navigator. It has been deposited in the entry of the genitalia of the mother.

It goes up through the cervix of the uterus, swims during the whole uterine cavity and once it is inside the fallopian tube, the encounter between thousands of sperm and the one egg occurs. Every human being has been conceived in nature inside the little tube, a tube of flesh we call fallopian, where test babies are indeed possible.

We cannot preserve the cells for more than a number of years. Nobody knows because it depends on the cells. According to Dr. Lejeune, ordinary cells which are very resistant are examples of more than fifteen years in the canister being thawed correctly to survive and stay alive.

For mouse embryo it’s some ten years. In our species, however, they are no longer than two years, no more than that. Nobody knows the actual technique how long the preservation would be real as it is a question he could not answer and he thinks nobody can.

But the information about the cell obviously tells all the tricks of the trade to build itself as individual. It has been tested in test- tube. It’s not a definition to build a theoretical man, but to build that particular human person we will call later Margaret, Peter or Paul.

The way this writer understands, in the mixing of cell and sperm of man and a woman during sexual intercourse, life already begins. It needs only to be nurtured in the womb of the woman to survive and form into a living human being.

Look at the artificial insemination. Don’t you wonder how the government can send a cow from Luzon to Mindanao inside a cigarette case? Pro-life people opposed to RHB believed the prize at stake in this war is worthy of the battle they are fighting for. Between the pros and cons, the decision is now yours!

Hole of Justice: The Ombudsman

Hole of Justice: The Ombudsman: Hole of Justice by Peter G. Jimenea The Ombudsman-Visayas Last Monday, January 30, 2012, a lady representative from the Office of the...

Hole of Justice: The Ombudsman

Hole of Justice: The Ombudsman: Hole of Justice by Peter G. Jimenea The Ombudsman-Visayas Last Monday, January 30, 2012, a lady representative from the Office of the...

Hole of Justice: The Ombudsman

Hole of Justice: The Ombudsman: Hole of Justice by Peter G. Jimenea The Ombudsman-Visayas Last Monday, January 30, 2012, a lady representative from the Office of the...

The Ombudsman

Hole of Justice

by Peter G. Jimenea

The Ombudsman-Visayas

Last Monday, January 30, 2012, a lady representative from the Office of the Ombudsman-Visayas announced over Ratsada that they will investigate the misuse of government car parked in front of a lodging house in the city. We learned it is owned by the Municipality of Ajuy, Iloilo.

Sus gino-o, are they really sincere to discipline that erring driver? Will they exert efforts in probing such case when there are still unresolved big cases pending at their office? Perhaps, Deputy Ombudsman for Visayas Pelagio Apostol should tell his people to shut up!

They cannot even arrived at the involvement of former mayor, now Cong. Jerry Trenas in the Pavia Housing case filed at their office eight years ago. But funny indeed, because former Mayor Mansueto Malabor widely believed the lesser evil in that case was the one indicted.

Under Mayor Trenas, the P137M for 413 units of low-cost houses for poor City Hall employees were spent without a unit completed. Worse, the P125M loan from PNB to finance the project was suddenly transferred to PVB, incurring a P12M expense for documentation (kuno), thus, increasing our obligation to 137M.

Probable cause needs only to rest on evidence showing that more likely than not, a crime has been committed. The evidence of unauthorized payments is embraced in RA 3019 and can lead a reasonably discreet and prudent man to believe that an offense charged has been committed.

The task to further investigate the involvement of Cong. Trenas was handed down to Apostol six months ago. Yet, the case that had consumed the city for eight years seems not good for the court. Thus, it creates public suspicion that this runaround of the Pavia Housing case by the Office of the Ombudsman is done in exchange for – you know what!

Now an official from the Ombudsman-Visayas brags to probe the misuse of that government vehicle. Oh my God, what a false impression of a speedy disposal of cases when this Pavia Housing Scam is a story of delay-in-eternity. Injustice lies fairly in “delayed” decision than “erroneous” that can be appealed immediately.

Now this city housing mess seems to disappear in the course of time. But God knows, the P137M is taxpayers’ money, prostituted by shameless officials with gross disregard to official responsibility and accountability attendant thereto.

The bond posted by the contractor equivalent to the monetary award was not confiscated when the contractor abandoned the project. The mayor ignored the resolution passed by the city council urging him to rescind the contract and sue the contractor. On why, he has yet to say.

 But Art. 1191 dictates, “the mayor has the power to rescind the contract in case one of the obligors cannot comply with what is incumbent upon him.” Yet, the mayor continued paying the contractor’s billings in millions despite the rusting project abandoned by the latter. Oh my God, there’s no probable cause still?

I have never seen a government office with officials so derelict and irresolute in the performance of duty. This infinite time extended for further investigation of Trenas’ involvement in the case is stepping over the line of pardonable behavior and can only be thought-of by officials with less-working-brain!

As enunciated in Baltazar vs. People, the task of presiding officer when the information is filed, is first and foremost to determine the existence of probable cause. It demands more than suspicion and requires less than evidence that would justify conviction. So, let the people see that still dangling Ombudsman resolution and we’ll rest our case!

The employees at the Ombudsman-Visayas Office should know that it is only for them and the government crooks that what they did was good. Lowly city hall employees are most sorely tempted to steal but don’t, so what a tolerance. But Dirty Harry says, they who profit from this mess must tolerate brave words to save face!

The Ombudsman-Visayas

Hole of Justice

by Peter G. Jimenea

The Ombudsman-Visayas

Last Monday, January 30, 2012, a lady representative from the Office of the Ombudsman-Visayas announced over Ratsada that they will investigate the misuse of government car parked in front of a lodging house in the city. We learned that it is owned by the Municipality of Ajuy, Iloilo.

Sus gino-o, are they really sincere to gather evidence to discipline that erring driver? Will they exert efforts in doing so when there are still unresolved big cases pending at their office? Perhaps, Deputy Ombudsman Pelagio Apostol should tell his people to shut up!

They cannot even probe the involvement of former mayor, now Cong. Jerry Trenas in the Pavia Housing case filed at their office eight years ago. Funny indeed, because former Mayor Mansueto Malabor widely believed the lesser evil in this case was the one indicted.

Under Mayor Trenas, the P137M for 413 units of low-cost houses for poor City Hall employees were spent without a unit completed. Worse, the P125M loan from PNB to finance the project was suddenly transferred to PVB, incurring a P12M expense for documentation (kuno), thus, increasing our obligation to 137M.

Probable cause needs only to rest on evidence showing that more likely than not, a crime has been committed. The evidence of unauthorized payments is embraced in RA 3019 and can lead a reasonably discreet and prudent man to believe that an offense charged has been committed.

The task to further investigate the involvement of Cong. Trenas was handed down to Apostol six months ago. Yet, the case that had consumed the city for eight years seems not good for the court. Thus, it creates public suspicion that this runaround of the Pavia Housing case by the Office of the Ombudsman is done in exchange for – you know what!

Now an official from the Ombudsman-Visayas brags to probe the misuse of that government vehicle. Oh my God, what a false impression of a speedy disposal of cases when this Pavia Housing Scam is a story of delay-in-eternity. Injustice lies fairly in “delayed” decision than “erroneous” that can be appealed immediately.

Now this city housing mess seems to disappear in the course of time. But God knows, the P137M is taxpayers’ money, prostituted by shameless officials with gross disregard to official responsibility and accountability attendant thereto.
 

The bond posted by the contractor equivalent to the monetary award was not confiscated when the contractor abandoned the project. The mayor ignored the resolution passed by the city council urging him to rescind the contract and sue the contractor. On why, he has yet to say.

 But Art. 1191 dictates, “the mayor has the power to rescind the contract in case one of the obligors cannot comply with what is incumbent upon him.” Yet, the mayor continued paying the contractor’s billings in millions despite the rusting project abandoned by the latter. Oh my God, there’s no probable cause still?

I have never seen a government office with officials so derelict and irresolute in the performance of duty. This infinite time extended for further investigation of Trenas’ involvement in the case is stepping over the line of pardonable behavior and can only be done by officials with less-working-brain!

As enunciated in Baltazar vs. People, the task of the presiding officer when the information is filed is first and foremost to determine the existence of probable cause. It demands more than suspicion and requires less than evidence that would justify conviction. So, let the people see that dangling resolution and we’ll rest our case!

The employees at the Ombudsman-Visayas Office should know that it is only for them and the government crooks that what they did was good. Lowly city hall employees are most sorely tempted to steal but don’t, what a tolerance. But Dirty Harry says, they who profit from this mess must tolerate brave words to save face!