by Belinda Olivares Cunanan
News
reports today said that President Noynoy is asking CJ Corona to explain the
discrepancies “between (Corona’s) statement of assets, liabilities and net worth
(SALN) and as reflected in his declared properties.” Asserting that CJ's defense
team could be resorting to “squid tactics” on this issue, P-Noy was quoted by
Star as saying “What is being asked is, ‘Did you file the SALN? Did you disclose
it publicly? He (CJ) can only say: ‘I filed on this date and it came out in this
newspaper’ in meeting the public disclosure requirement of the Constitution.”
‘
P-Noy’s
prosecutor-allies have succeeded in forcing public disclosure of CJ Corona’s
SALN through a subpoena issued by the Senate trial court to the SC Clerk of
Court. All the SC justices’ SALNs have been withheld from public scrutiny for
the past 23 continuous years by the High Court, through an en banc resolution
issued during the term of the late SC Chief Justice Marcelo Fernan in 1989, and
followed all the way to the Corona Court. Since last Wednesday, when the
subpoena took effect, Corona’s SALN has become open season in the internet, in
gross violation of rules of the Senate trial court against UNAUTHORIZED
disclosure to the public (two House prosecutors were seen taking cell-phone
pictures of it and are prime suspect of this violation).
Now
that Corona’s controversial SALN has been made public and P-Noy has challenged
him to justify the discrepancies there, it behooves P-Noy, too, to comment on
his own net worth, based on his SALN. As shown in Corona's SALNs from 2002, when
he entered the SC as associate justice, the CJ's net worth increased pretty
steadily in small increments until 2010, when it increased by 57.5 % over his
2009 worth. The explanation of his defense team for the increase is that CJ sold
property, and the prosecutors will be on the look-out for
this.
On
the other hand, P-Noy should explain why his net worth maintained a small but
very steady increase every year since 1998, when he became a member of the House
for nine years and for three years as senator; but suddenly it registered a
whopping 250% increase in 2010, when he became President with his government
salary of P820,000 a year.
The
behavior of the two top officials' net worth is quite easy to see and compare in
the following two charts:
 |
| getrealphilippines.com/blog/wp-content/upload.. |
The
question that comes to mind is: what accounts for the whopping 250% leap in
P-Noy's net worth? Some folks I checked out his chart with opined that perhaps
it was due to inheritance from his late mother Cory, who passed away in August
of 2009. Or perhaps it could have been his divestment of his share of Hacienda
Luisita to, reportedly, one of his siblings, although someone else argued how it
could have been from Luisita when that estate has been badly ailing financially,
especially in the last few years? Or could this increase have come from
considerable campaign contributions that were unspent during his candidacy in
2010 (because there was just too much of them)?
Then
the next question is, did the President pay the correct taxes on either or all
of these financial developments that favored him?
P-Noy
should explain the gargantuan jump in his net worth, just as CJ will be made to
explain his own increase in net worth when he was appointed to the helm of the
High Court.
