Pimentel assails Ombudsman on huge backlog of graft cases
Senate Minority Leader Aquilino "Nene" Q. Pimentel, Jr. (PDP-Laban) has criticized the mounting backlog of cases that are unresolved and pending with the Office of the Ombudsman, despite the substantial increase in its budget and complement of investigators.
From some 18,200 cases crowding the dockets of the anti-graft body in 2006, Pimentel said official OMB records show that the total number of pending cases has risen to 21,065 by June 30, 2007.
Reminding the Ombudsman about the dictum that "justice delayed is justice denied," Pimentel said it is sitting on many of these cases for a number of years "without any sign of resolution in sight."
He however said that the piling up of these cases may not necessarily be the fault of the incumbent Ombudsman, who has been in office for barely two years.
"There are certain limitations under which the Office of the Ombudsman operates. Nonetheless, it is important that the people are made aware that cases are being disposed of as fast and as reasonably as can be done, without giving the impression that only the cases that are against the critics of the government are attended to with some dispatch, while those against people who are always toeing the administration line would be wallowing in the mire of forgetfulness," the minority leader said.
Pimentel noted that at the Senate plenary debate on the 2008 national budget, the Ombudsman reasoned out that its relatively slow disposition of cases was due to "lack of personnel" and that many of them being "politically motivated."
But he said that Malacañang, through Cabinet Secretary Ricardo Saludo, has just reported that the budget for the Office of the Ombudsman has been doubled to P1 billion a year, which enabled it to hire 200 more graft investigators and 50 prosecutors starting 2006.
Aside from this, the Office of the Ombudsman received a large share of the P2 billion funding for the anti-graft campaign granted by the United States through its Millennium Development Account last year.
On the claim that several of the graft complaints have been filed by politicians or their followers to harass their political opponents, Pimentel said that is "no excuse" for not acting on the cases.
"If the cases are one of harassment, they should be dismissed. In the matter of stealing public funds, usually the ones who would have the guts to bring them to the Ombudsman would be the political opponents of the alleged culprits because the ordinary man on the street is apathetic," he said.
"Therefore the fact that a case is filed by political opponents does not ipso facto mean that the case has no merit. If the case was found to have no merit, then the obligation of the Ombudsman is to dismiss it. That is to be expected. But to allow the case to languish in the bowels of the bureaucracy of the Ombudsman's office would, to my mind, add to the injustice of it all," he added.
The unresolved high-profile cases, involving prominent personalities, include the P2.3 billion fertilizer fund scam, the misuse of the multi-billion peso road users tax proceeds, the illegal diversion of quarry fee collection in Pampanga and the IMPSA bribery scandal.
Official records show that with 18,200 pending graft cases as of Dec. 31, 2006, some 4,328 other cases were added to the OMB's dockets in the succeeding months of 2007.
However, Pimentel also notied that the OMB filed 35 new cases with the Sandiganbayan and 155 others with the regular courts.
Within the same period, the OMB dismissed 123 cases and 150 were decided with sanctions or conviction, bringing the number of unresolved cases to 21,064 as of June 30, 2007.
Pimentel said these data seem to belie the administration's claim that the pace of resolution of graft cases has significantly improved. (PNA)