SENATE FREES ARROYO BOOKKEEPER / LACSON BERATES ROWENA AT HEARING
MANILA, AUGUST 27, 2011 (TRIBUNE) Bowing to public sentiment against the Senate on the arrogant and abusive treatment certain senators give their "invited" resource persons and guests whom they categorize as "hostile," the Senate yesterday freed former LTA bookkeeper Rowena del Rosario from detention.
She was earlier placed under arrest and ordered detained "indefinitely" for being evasive in her answers to the questions posed to her by the senators, who didn't like her answers, as she held on to her claim that it was Rep. Ignacio "Iggy" Arroyo who had leased the helicopters and not bought them.
But the former bookkeeper of Iggy for the past 11 years yesterday admitted before Senate probers that she was unaware of the existence of his supposed Jose Pidal bank accounts while he was still her boss.
Rowena told the blue ribbon committee that she did not know or encounter the controversial bank account alleged to be owned by former First Gentleman Jose Miguel "Mike" Arroyo.
"I'm not familiar with it," she told the panel chaired by Sen. Teofisto "TG" Guingona currently investigating the issue of alleged anomalous acquisition of helicopters by the Philippine National Police (PNP), when the matter of the Pidal scandal was asked.
The bank account, exposed by Sen. Panfilo Lacson in 2003 that supposedly kept laundered deposits of the former First Gentleman, was eventually claimed to be owned by the congressman.
Lacson and some other senators have been trying to pin down former First Gentleman (FFG) Jose Miguel "Mike" Arroyo on the Pidal case, to buttress their charge that it was Mike Arroyo who bought the helicopters, and not just leased them, and not his brother Iggy, who was said to have taken the fall for his brother.
[PHOTO COURTESY OF ABS-CBN - Just coming off jail time for contempt in the Senate, the Arroyos' bookkeeper, Rowena Del Rosario, takes a swig from a bottle of water as exchanges with senators again became heated during the Blue Ribbon Committee's hearing on the police purchase of second-hand helicopters.]
Del Rosario, for the first time, admitted having been under the employ of FFG in 2000 when the he was the president of LTA Inc. or before turning over the position to Iggy in 2001, as a "volunteer" in the First Gentleman Foundation.
FFG re-assumed the post in 2010, she said.
Since January 2004 up to the present, she was also internal auditor of the said foundation and yet, Del Rosario claimed she could not recall any of its "donors."
In last Monday's hearing, she stated that in her entire stint as LTA bookkeeper, she was only reporting to Iggy and not FFG, a matter that was noted by Senate President Jinggoy Estrada after her disclosure of her work she had done for the then presidential husband.
"Maybe I was not asked about it, the reason I never mentioned it," she said when asked by Estrada.
Del Rosario, who was cited in contempt and ordered detained by the committee after Monday's hearing until she was released yesterday, said she resigned from LTA Inc. only last July 20.
It was Sen. Francis "Chiz" Escudero who inquired from Del Rosario if she had encountered the alleged Pidal account being claimed by Iggy, having been involved in handling financial transactions of the former congressman, including the remittance of $500,000 supposedly made by LTA to a helicopter manifacturer in the US in December 2004.
"So he never even mentioned that he was keeping this kind of an account or that you processed a transaction under the name of one Jose Pidal, the (bank) account of which was allegedly owned by Congressman Iggy?" the senator asked.
Del Rosario answered in a negative while admitting that she heard about it when it became a subject of an expose of Lacson and investigation of the Senate.
"Prior to that, had it been a subject of any conversation of Iggy," he further asked.
"Never, your honor," she retorted.
Another witness of Lacson, Dr. Mely Sorra, chief of the questioned document division of the PNP crime laboratory, who testified before the same panel sometime in 2003, told Senate probers that her findings on the signature or handwriting specimen submitted for analysis by Iggy was "inconclusive," despite the fact that in 2003, she never stated such and went along with another then witness, police official Restituto Mosqueda, who had recanted his testimony before the Senate eight years after the fact.
She corroborated the earlier claims at the Guingona headed Senate panel of Mosqueda that they were not actually given a "questioned document" which was supposed to be the basis for comparison and analysis of the handwriting of Iggy.
Instead of the usual procedure where the document to be submitted that bore the questioned signature should have been an original copy, in the case of the Pidal issue called for the yielding of a copy of a bank check, this was not followed, she said.
They were merely given a Xerox copy of the supposed original Pidal signatures and three pieces of bond paper bearing the standard handwriting specimen signature of Iggy, she told the panel.
"I compared it with the handwriting of Jose Pidal which appears on three pieces of coupon bond paper and my findings is that there are similarities and my conclusion is that, there is an indication that the Jose Pidal and the standard signature Jose Pidal were written by one and the same person. But my findings were not conclusive your honor. It is only an indication," she said adding that "indication" means "it only shows" or "suggests" that it was done by the same person.
"In other words, it cannot be said that based on the expert's analysis of the questioned document, that it's definite that Iggy Arroyo is Jose Pidal and not Mike Arroyo," Lacson said.
"Yes your honor," Sorra said.
"But the fact is, i'ts not even a questioned document. It's a blank document. It's not even a document. It's a blank piece of paper on which was written a signature," commented by Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile.
Sorra, when asked by Enrile what prompted her to conduct the laboratory examination, said there was a written request made to her and an instruction from Mosqueda, her superior then.
The specimen and photocopy of the alleged original Pidal signature was supposedly sent by a certain lawyer Antonio Zulueta, whom Sen. Sergio Osmeña III noted as the known lawyer of the Arroyo brothers.
Sorra claimed she followed the instruction to examine the documents but did not compromise the integrity of her examination report.
Sorra underscored the fact her findings did not actually have so much weight as the results were interpreted as "maybe or maybe not" be written by one and the same person.
Escudero asked Sorra about the validity of the earlier claims made by Mosqueda, that they were under the instructions then of Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno and she denied this. "That is not true," she said.
Guingona clarified that senators only want to show that "there is a pattern, everytime Mike Arroyo is in trouble, Iggy Arroyo takes the fall for him or Iggy Arroyo comes to his rescue.
"This happened during the Jose Pidal scandal and now that there is this helicopter scandal, he's at it again even if a number of individuals have come out and identified Mike Arroyo as the (alleged) real owner of the choppers. He came out to lay claim on these (choppers) so there's really a pattern here," he said.
Lacson berates Rowena; Senate to pin down Arroyos on tax evasion By Angie M. Rosales 08/26/2011
Not a single centavo was paid as tax by Negros Occidental Rep. Ignacio "Iggy" Arroyo or his family's company, LTA Inc., in the transactions with Lionair Inc., Senate probers were told yesterday.
As such, possible new charges, that of apparent tax evasion would likely be among the recommendations by the Senate blue ribbon committee chairman, Sen. Teofisto "TG" Guingona said.
Culpability of some members of the First Family on the alleged anomalous P105-million deal can be pursued "based on the statement of facts that implicate the LTA and the Arroyos," he added.
Former LTA bookkeeper Rowena del Rosario openly admitted before senators that they were not paying taxes, including value added tax (VAT) charges concerning payments and other transactions involving Lionair in which the Arroyo-owned firm allegedly entered into a lease agreement on the use of its helicopters.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson started the issue by asking Del Rosario if LTA paid $37,500 as taxes when it remitted it $500,000 to the Robinsons USA, manufacturer of Robinsons R44 Raven 1 as what the latter branded as rental payment.
"I do not remember any taxes paid," she told the senator.
Lacson started berating Del Rosario as he tried to squeeze blood from the latter on the business dealings of her supposed former boss with Lionair as her job description calls for her to record transactions of what she described as relatively small company like LTA that averages a monthly income of only P350,000.
"You should give us a definite answer. You've been a bookkeeper for 11 years, you should have known all of its transactions. So don't tell us that you do not recall any because very conveniently, if you don't want to answer truthfully, you just say that," he said.
"(But) I do not remember paying any tax. I cannot categorically state if there was any payment (for taxes) made," she insisted, referring to the said transaction that took place in Dec. 2004.
Lacson then chastised the witness for trying to look stupid before them when she's obviously capable of answering their queries.
"You may not have any intention in taking us for a ride but you are fooling us," the senator said, before telling the committee that the said transaction was subject to tax of 7.5 percent of gross rentals, under the National Internal Revenue Code of the US government.
"Now you're saying you cannot remember recording in your books of LTA that you paid taxes and this only means that you were not paying taxes because you, as its bookkeeper have not been paying any tax. So you're (company) has tax evasion (case), if indeed what you paid to Robinson was advance rental fees," he pointed out.
Lionair Inc. president Archibald Po and general manager Rene Sia, in their testimonies in previous hearings, claimed that the $500,000 was the alleged initial downpayment of former First Gentleman Jose Miguel "Mike" Arroyo in acquiring five choppers sent through wire transfer.
Senators Sergio Osmeña and Francis "Chiz" Escudero made follow through questions on the issue of taxes, the former managing to extract from Del Rosario an answer that of all of LTA's dealings, it was only with Lionair that VAT payments were not made.
Osmeña said it was a violation of the law, but Del Rosario replied that they were not charged with VAT because Lionair was not issuing any receipts to them whenever they pay the monthly rental fees, the accumulated amount of which reached over P18 million.
"But Lionair said what they were collecting from you were reimbursements but you're telling us that these are for lease payments. Therfore you should pay VAT," he said.
"But whatever payments made to them were not recorded in the books (of accounts) of LTA," Del Rosario said.
Pressed as to the source of income of LTA to cover for the lease payments to Lionair, Del Rosario admitted not knowing anything about this in the more than seven years of paying Lionair its monthly dues.
"What happened now is we have been able to get from her answers which makes clearly the Arroyo brothers liable on the tax angle and she did undertake to appear in the future hearings. We will take her word at that," said Guingona after the hearing.
Also during the hearing, Sia claimed that the lease agreement and supporting documents produced by Iggy, such as his cedula or residence certificate, were allegedly manufactured as it were antedated.
Sia told the committee that when the supposed lease agreement was inked in 2004, he was not yet with Lionair. He joined the company only in 2008.
Also, they sought certification from the Pasay City office that issued Sia's supposed residence certificate and was told that such document was not released by them.
Sia, however, admitted being made to sign a document sometime in 2008 for the supposed lease agreement but was not able to even read the entire contract as he was only given the page where he affixed his signature, a fact that Po corroborated.
"That is very telling, what Sia said that he only signed it in 2008, that it was a belated move. So how was it possible for Sia to validate that indeed it was a lease (contract) when he was not even working for Lionair then?" commented Osmena to reporters after the hearing.
Osmeña also expressed belief that Del Rosario only resigned recently when she had to testify, adding that if the Arroyo brothers will be able to show enough income to support how they managed to come up with the $500,000 in cash and eventually the remaining $1 million balance, then "they will be able to get away with it (tax evasion charge)."
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