Sandigan denies pork plunder demurrers
Had the Sandiganbayan granted the demurrers, the charges against Napoles and Valdez would have been dropped due to insufficiency of evidence
The Sandiganbayan Fifth Division revealed on Tuesday that it has denied the demurrers to evidence filed by convicted pork barrel scam mastermind Janet Lim Napoles and former APEC partylist Rep. Edgar Valdez in relation to their plunder case.
In a resolution dated 28 August, the Fifth Division of the anti-graft court explained that the demurrers were denied because the prosecution has established the validity of the plunder charges.
It added that the amount involved allegedly reached over P50 million and constitutes to plunder in accordance with Republic Act 7080 or the Plunder Law.
To recall, Valdez allegedly amassed P57.78 million worth in kickbacks by allocating his Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) to ghost projects of Napoles’ bogus non-government organizations.
Had the Sandiganbayan granted the demurrers, the charges against Napoles and Valdez would have been dropped due to insufficiency of evidence.
“Valdez and Napoles hypothesize in their respective demurrers that the jurisdictional amount of P50,000,000 for the crime of plunder to prosper was not established by the prosecution. The arguments are unpersuasive,” said the resolution penned by Associate Justice Maria Theresa Mendoza-Arcega.
The Sandiganbayan also noted that there is sufficient evidence to show that the accused had amassed ill-gotten wealth, as attested by the Office of the Ombudsman’s fact-finding team.
“It was established that they conducted an investigation on Valdez’s PDAF utilization. They discovered that some of the PDAF projects of the said accused were liquidated but not fully implemented,” it said.
Aside from this argument, the accused also claimed that the information against them has no bearing as it failed to specify who among the accused was the main plunderer — an assertion that was also made by Napoles in a separate plunder case, this time involving former Sen. Jinggoy Estrada.
The argument hinges on the dismissed plunder case against former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo where a main plunderer was identified, but the anti-graft court stressed the differences on the present case and Arroyo’s plunder case, where a main plunderer has to be pointed out since all of the accused were public officials when the crime was committed.
“A simple reading of the Information in the instant case readily shows that the main plunderer being charged is Valdez since he is the only public officer named therein, while the other two other accused are private individuals who allegedly acted in connivance with the former,” the Sandiganbayan said.
After the denial of their demurrers, the next hearing for the initial presentation of the defense’s evidence was scheduled on 12 September at 1:30 p.m.