[Pastilan] The Davao lies are having a meeting - Rappler

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There is a special stage in a political scandal when the facts stop cooperating with the explanations.

This is usually when the explanations begin multiplying and clashing with each other. The Gencorp affair has reached that stage.

According to Vice President Sara Duterte’s own Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs), she has/had a business interest in Gencorp.

Then came the clarification that Gencorp is not her company, based on documents submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

This is an intriguing distinction. Apparently, one can have a declared business interest in a company without actually having an interest in the company. The dictionary may eventually need to be called as a hostile witness.

But then the contracts arrived, and Davao City’s government gave Gencorp contracts worth over P30 million starting in 2022, according to Mayor Baste Duterte, Sara’s younger brother. That is considerably more than the P14 million initially reported. That’s a hell of a lot of spaghetti, burgers, ketchup and whatever else comes with a side of indigestion.

In a statement, Baste swears he knew nothing about his sister’s connection to Gencorp. He also pointed to corporate filings with the SEC showing that the vice president’s name does not appear as an incorporator, director or stockholder.

And there, suddenly, is the problem.

If the corporate records say one thing and the vice president’s SALN says another, someone is eventually going to have to explain what Sara Duterte meant by declaring an interest in Gencorp, and why that interest does not appear in the company’s corporate records.

So Sara Duterte declared an interest, but Gencorp’s corporate records do not identify her as an owner. Her brother confirms that the city government awarded Gencorp contracts, but quickly does a Pontius Pilate by adding that neither he nor other city hall officials knew about his sister’s declared interest in the firm.

The most hilarious idea, of course, is that everybody is telling the truth simultaneously. In effect, Sara’s interest exists somewhere other than where one would normally expect to find it.

The prospect of the tough-talking Baste Duterte taking the witness stand in the impeachment court ought to be entertaining, if only because his confirmation of the contracts has handed prosecutors precisely the factual record they wanted, while his attempt to distance himself from his sister’s connection to Gencorp has raised rather more questions than it has answered.

Baste should sack whoever advised him to make that statement, and then ask whoever drafted it whether they have ever encountered the rudimentary concept of self-preservation. He may have imagined he was closing the door, but instead he seems to have flung open the gates.

If a city mayor can preside over millions of pesos in contracts involving a company in which his own sister has declared a business interest, and then plead ignorance of the entire arrangement, the question is no longer merely whether the contracts were properly procured. It is whether a mayor who knows so little about the business of his own government is actually governing it at all, or merely occupying the chair while the paperwork conducts the city in his place.

As the prosecutors have correctly pointed out, this is where “due diligence” enters the room, looking as though it has just discovered that it was invited to the wrong party. Nobody expects a mayor to know everything, of course. But he is surely expected to know enough about the machinery of his own government to account for millions in public contracts.

“I didn’t know” is not a defense so much as an admission that makes the question unavoidable. If a mayor can invoke ignorance of millions in government contracts as his excuse, one is entitled to wonder whether Davao elected a mayor or merely paid for a nameplate.

And the more this Gencorp story is examined, the stranger the central contradiction becomes.

At some point, the question ceases to be whether there are too many contradictions. The question is why there are so many.

Political scandals often begin with one inconvenient fact. They become crises when every attempt to explain that fact produces another inconvenient fact.

Gencorp is beginning to resemble less a company than a group project in which nobody remembers who wrote what.

And the lies, if that is what they are, appear to have scheduled another meeting. 

Meanwhile, the impeachment court has voted to make the two-thirds threshold for conviction contingent on the actual roll call when judgment day arrives. Simply put, the once near-fantastical prospect of removing Sara Duterte from office and barring her from holding public office has become a live possibility.

What is less discussed is what this does to the flow of money.

It is difficult to imagine that the 2028 presidential race is not already being plotted, financed and, somewhere in the shadows, quietly bankrolled. But political money is rarely charitable. It likes a plausible return on investment. 

Would a political funder keep releasing millions into a campaign whose principal could soon be removed from office and disqualified from seeking public office? 

Come on. Political donors may be many things, but sentimental is rarely one of them. Pastilan.– Rappler.com