By Sammy F. Martin
MANILA, Oct. 27 (PNA) — Government prosecutors filed a motion on Monday for the issuance by the Sandiganbayan of a writ of preliminary garnishment in connection with the plunder and graft charges filed against detained Sen. Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. for his alleged involvement in the pork barrel scam.
The state lawyers, led by Deputy Prosecutor John Turalba, asked the anti-graft court to issue a garnishment order to secure Revilla’s alleged kickbacks worth Php 224.5 million, believed to be acquired illegally through the bogus non-governmental organizations (NGOs) controlled by businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles.
The garnished properties could be in the form of cash, real properties, shares of stocks, and other financial instruments, the motion said.
The prosecutors said in their motion that there is a need to preserve the alleged kickbacks in the course of the court hearings.
“There is prima facie evidence showing that much of the accused’s wealth is ill-gotten, the same having been sourced from public money amassed, accumulated or acquired from bribes, commissions and kickbacks amounting to Php 224 million from his Php 515 million PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund). Such Php 224 million wealth, which appears to be prima facie ill-gotten, has to be preserved pending final determination of the legality thereof, including any purchased property sourced from such money,” the motion read.
The prosecution wants to secure Revilla’s alleged commissions with the help of the Sandiganbayan Sheriff and Security Services, the sheriffs of Metro Manila courts and the Philippine National Police (PNP).
A notice of garnishment is a legal notification served on a third party to hold, subject to a court’s direction, money or property belonging to a person or persons that are subject to litigation. This means that if the court issues the notice, it deems that Revilla may owe the garnished assets to the government, which maintains that these assets were unlawfully acquired and therefore belong to the public coffers.
The prosecution said Revilla “had the means and capacity to conceal, remove or dispose of the monies and properties he unlawfully acquired.”
“The accused has abused the ordinary PDAF processes to cloak with a mystique of legality their nefarious scheme of siphoning public monies for their own. It is thus quite logical to believe that he will likewise abuse judicial and legal processes to conceal or dispose any part of his unlawfully acquired wealth,” the motion further read.
Revilla is currently detained at the PNP Custodial Center in Camp Crame, Quezon City.
On Thursday, Revilla once again insisted that the multimillion-peso savings in his several bank records were purely fruit of his labor and products of his hard work in his long career in the film and television industry. (PNA)