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Ambassador Domingo Siazon Jr. said former Senate President Franklin
Drilon lied when he claimed that the envoy told him that the US
government is displeased with the Philippines for its Spratlys deal
with China.
Siazon, formerly Foreign Affairs secretary and
now envoy to Japan, was referring to a Philippine Daily Inquirer
story about the Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking signed by the
Philippines, China and Vietnam in 2005.
In that paper, Drilon was quoted as saying,
“Ambassador Siazon told me sometime in 2005 that the US was pissed
off with the Philippines warming up to China as evidenced by these
deals, contracts and loans that we have entered into with China.”
The conversation supposedly took place during dinner at the
Philippine ambassador’s residence in Tokyo.
Siazon said he was quite surprised by Drilon’s
statements.
“First of all, in 2005, no dinner was held at
the ambassador’s residence with the presence of former Senate
President Drilon. The embassy has the documents to prove this,” he
said.
Second, Siazon added that except for the
agreement to do a joint seismic study, he was not aware of the
deals, contracts and loans that had been entered into by the
Philippines and China.
“In my profession and long experience as a
diplomat, it is highly unlikely that in my conversations with the
third-highest official of the Philippines, I would be using the word
‘p…d.’”
However Siazon admitted meeting Drilon—not in
connection with the Spratlys deal but about President Arroyo’s
visit to Japan.
“I solicited the support of then-Senate
President Franklin Drilon to convince President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
to resume visiting Japan, as her last visit was in December 2003. In
the past, since September 2001 to December 2003, the President had
visited Japan five times, including a state visit,” the ambassador
said.
The tripartite deal is a three-year commercial
agreement among China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC),
PetroVietnam and the Philippine National Oil Co. (PNOC) to jointly
gather seismic data in certain areas of the South China Sea.
In the agreement, the three national oil
companies are to jointly acquire seismic data without exploration,
drilling or production activities, the Department of Energy
explained.
Neither the President nor the Energy department
signed the agreement. But the three companies’ respective
governments had to approve the deal to make it binding, officials
said.
Secret witness
not Mañalac
Eduardo Mañalac, the former PNOC president, may
have close ties to the Chinese government, but he is not the
“secret” witness that Sen. Panfilo Lacson will present in
Tuesday’s hearing of the scrapped $330-million national broadband
project.
Lacson issued this clarification after reports
came out naming Mañalac as his secret witness. The senator said he
does not know Mañalac and had never talked with him.
Mañalac was signatory to the Joint Marine
Seismic Undertaking agreement signed on September 1, 2004.
Lacson had filed Resolution No. 319 seeking a
Senate inquiry into the agreement, as he cited reports that the
Philippines had agreed to it even if it covered areas within
Philippine jurisdiction and in exchange for $8 billion in official
development assistance from China. The aid included the National
Broadband Network project that was later awarded to ZTE Corp.,
China’s largest telecommunications company and one of the biggest
in the world.
Lacson said his witness knows more about certain
aspects of the broadband deal than Romulo Neri, particularly on how
the $41-million advances made by ZTE were divided by what another
Senate witness, Dante Madriaga, had called “the greedy group.”
Neri was director general of the National Economic Development
Authority, which had reviewed the broadband project.
Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, chairman of the Senate
blue-ribbon committee, had issued subpoenas for the members of the
group and their aides. They are former Chairman Benjamin Abalos of
the Commission on Elections; cable TV executive Leo San Miguel;
businessman Ruben Reyes, who is said to be very close to both Abalos
and the President’s husband, Jose Miguel “Mike” Arroyo;
retired police Gen. Quirino “Torch” de la Torre; and Jimmy Paz,
the former chief of staff of Abalos.
Madriaga testified that San Miguel had told him
that $30 million of the advances from ZTE was used to finance the
campaign of administration candidates in the 2007 elections.
Madriaga is now under the care of the Senate, just like another
witness, Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada Jr.
-- Angelo S. Samonte and Efren L. Danao
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