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What impeachment made difficult to do, the NBN deal did. On October
1, Comelec Chairman Benjamin Abalos Sr. resigned following
revelations he offered $10 million to businessman Jose de Venecia
3rd, namesake and son of the House Speaker, and P200 million in
bribes to acting Commission on Higher Education Chairman Romulo Neri.
The bribery attempts surfaced in the ongoing
hearings by the Senate antigraft blue-ribbon committee, chaired by
Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, and the Senate Committee on Trade, chaired
by Sen. Mar Roxas.
Abalos announced his resignation, effective
immediately, on Monday at his suburban Mandaluyong City residence
amid accusations that he brokered the national broadband network (NBN)
contract between Chinese supplier ZTE Corp. and the Department of
Transportation and Communications.
“These issues have affected me, my family and
my privacy,” a tearful Abalos declared. “My resignation is not
an admission of guilt,” he emphasized.
“I will carry on the crusade to expose these
lies against this person. ‘Di pa tapos ang labanan’ [The fight
is not over],” he asserted as loyal followers broke into chants of
“Abalos, Abalos, Abalos!”
Abalos was referring to Jose de Venecia 3rd,
businessman and son of Speaker Jose de Venecia, who alleged that the
poll chief had offered $10 million for him and his company,
Amsterdam Holdings Inc., to drop their bid for the NBN project.
Abalos said he resigned to shield the Comelec
and his family from the NBN-ZTE controversy. He has rejected all
accusations against him, including the alleged bribe he had offered
former National Economic and Development Authority Director General
Romulo Neri for a favorable endorsement of the NBN project. He
insisted both Joey de Venecia and Neri were lying.
Despite resigning, Abalos’s troubles are not
over. An impeachment complaint filed against him by Vice-Gov. Rolex
Suplico of Iloilo will no longer prosper since he is no longer a
constitutional official. “The objective of impeachment has been
accomplished, which is removal,” Suplico said, but “we will now
file graft charges against him.”
Before the Senate, he probably needs to go back
to present his full side on the NBN-ZTE controversy and fill
loopholes in his own previous testimony and those of de Venecia and
Neri.
Brown-tanned and grizzled, Abalos was a one-time
golf caddy and shoeshine boy who sent himself to law school by
working during daytime and studying at night. His parents were
locker keepers at the 127-hectare Wack Wack Golf and Country Club.
He became the youngest prosecutor at 27 and judge for 12 years.
Abalos himself became a long-time president of the golf club, one of
the most prestigious in the country.
Abalos finished law at Manuel L. Quezon
University in 1957 and became a prosecuting attorney at 27.
Declaring no man is above the law, he subpoenaed the then chief
justice of the Supreme Court who was sued for “unjust judgment.”
Abalos was fired after two years. He was given executive clemency
and promoted by Ferdinand Marcos as judge. He was an outstanding
judge for 10 consecutive years.
He ran for vice-mayor in 1963 and mayor in 1980
and lost both times. He said he was cheated. When Marcos was ousted
in 1986, Abalos reigned supreme in Mandaluyong as mayor for 12
years. He improved the town’s revenue from P38 million in year 1
to P1.2 billion in year 12. In 1998, he was succeeded by his son,
BenHur, the second of his five children and a political science
graduate from La Salle and a law alumnus from Ateneo. They made the
once sleepy bedroom community into a bustling crossroads city and
the hub of among the biggest malls in the country—SM, Rustan’s,
Robinsons and EDSA Shangri-La.
Because of the 1963 and 1980 cheating, Abalos,
as Comelec chairman, vowed never to use the poll body as an
instrument of electoral fraud.
But after the 2004 presidential elections,
allegations of massive fraud surfaced, capped by the now legendary
“Hello, Garci” wiretapping scandal in which a voice similar to
that of President Arroyo’s was overheard talking to Comelec
official Virgilio Garcillano pleading with him to give her at least
a one-million-vote margin over the actor Fernando Poe Jr.
Previously, the Supreme Court had ordered the
prosecution of Comelec officials led by Abalos for the massive
overpricing of the poll body’s P1.3-billion automatic counting
machines. Abalos escaped unscathed.
Mrs. Arroyo was proclaimed by the Batasan winner
in the hotly contested 2004 presidential race with almost 11 million
votes, a margin of 1.125 million votes, exactly the number of votes
she had wanted to be her lead over her popular opponent.
Both President Arroyo and Garcillano escaped
prosecution but the public perception persisted she had cheated her
way to the presidency. She reached the nadir of her popularity.
In Abalos, the President is the loser.
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