By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: October 1, 2007
MANILA: The man at the center of a corruption scandal that threatens to reach President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo resigned Monday as chairman of the Philippine election commission and promised to sue his detractors.
Benjamin Abalos said he resigned to protect the Commission on Elections from damage caused by recent Senate testimony that he had offered a Filipino businessman and a member of Arroyo’s cabinet millions of dollars in bribes to help a Chinese firm, ZTE, win a $329 million contract to build a nationwide broadband network for the Philippine government.
Allegations that he had interceded on behalf of ZTE prompted a Senate investigation two weeks ago. The scandal, critics and analysts have said, poses a serious threat to Arroyo, as her political opponents seem determined to directly link her to the deal.
“I did this to spare the Comelec from the malicious attacks against my person,” Abalos said in an emotional press conference Monday, referring to the Commission on Elections. But, he added, “the fight is not yet over. I will continue to clear my name.”
Abalos, a political ally of Arroyo, has been hard-pressed to explain why he befriended officials of ZTE, dined and played golf with them in China and, by his own admission, introduced them to Filipino officials who later approved ZTE’s bid for the project over its competitors’.
In media interviews and during the Senate hearings, Abalos said he had done nothing improper and had merely tried to help promote the Philippines as an investment destination.
At the hearings, Jose de Venecia 3rd, chairman of Amsterdam Holdings, which lost to ZTE in the bidding, testified that Abalos had offered him $10 million to withdraw his bid. Romulo Neri, the commissioner for higher education, who was Arroyo’s socioeconomic planning secretary when the deal was approved early this year, testified last week that Abalos had offered him $4.4 million to approve ZTE’s bid. Abalos, who was sitting one seat away from Neri at that hearing, called Neri a liar.
Neri testified that he later told Arroyo about Abalos’s offer and that she told him not to accept it. When opponents of Arroyo in the Senate asked Neri what else the president had known about the project, which has since been suspended, Neri invoked executive privilege, leading to speculation that Arroyo had something to hide.
Arroyo’s opponents contend that she may have acted improperly in approving the project despite the alleged misconduct. Venecia, whose father is the speaker of the House of Representatives, testified that Arroyo’s husband, José Miguel Arroyo, had angrily told him to “back off” from bidding for the project.
Abalos’s lawyer, Gabriel Villareal, said Abalos would sue Neri and de Venecia. “People should not judge him,” he said. “It was an agonizing decision for him and his family,” he said of Abalos’s decision to resign.
Once a caddy at the same golf club where he allegedly offered the bribe to Neri, Abalos rose to become mayor of Mandaluyong, a Manila suburb. Arroyo’s father, the late president Diosdado Macapagal, later appointed him a judge. Arroyo named him chairman of the election commission in 2002.
