Whenever I review this 1997 investigative article of Sheila Coronel on the issue of judicial corruption, I try to persuade myself that, notwithstanding the evidence which tend to prove the veracity thereof, I still feel that the Philippine justice system is not a hopeless situation, so long as we have idealist, young and moral Filipino lawyers in out midst.
Justice to the Highest Bidder
by Sheila S. Coronel
Is Justice for Sale?
Abraham Sarmiento did not think so. But in 1991, when he was still a justice of the Supreme Court, an attorney on his staff was invited to lunch by a former law school classmate, Danilo Gutierrez, whose father Hugo was then a member of the high tribunal.
The lunch took place at a well-known seafood restaurant, and in the course of the meal, Sarmiento's assistant was asked whether P3 million was enough to sway her boss, who had been assigned to write the decision on the Banco Filipino case. The insolvent bank had been closed by the Central Bank (CB) in 1985, and it was contesting the closure in the high court, accusing then CB Governor Jose Fernandez of wanting to take over the bank himself.
The assistant was told she would not want for anything if she helped out, but Gutierrez never made clear in whose behalf he was making the offer. Sarmiento reported the incident to the court en banc. "The Court asked Hugo to find out from his son what had really transpired," he recounted. "The son said, 'Don't believe her, she's schizophrenic.' So this was relayed to the Court."
Sarmiento inhibited himself from the case because apart from that incident, he was also a neighbor of a member of the family that owned the bank. The Court, he said, never acted on his report as his assistant refused to execute an affidavit against a former classmate.
Banco Filipino won. Among those who voted in its favor was Gutierrez who, despite the incident involving his son, did not abstain from the discussions.
In the legal community, the Banco Filipino case is considered a landmark. The stakes in this case were exceptionally high, running up to billions of pesos. It was also among the first few instances when rumors of pay-offs to Supreme Court justices began circulating in both the bar and the bench.
Although most of the discussions took place during the term of Chief Justice Marcelo Fernan, the ruling on the Banco Filipino case was released just three days after Andres Narvasa was named the country's chief magistrate.
Five-and-a-half years later, Narvasa presides over a court whose reputation has sunk to its lowest in a decade. In January, the Makati Business Club asked the country's top executives to rate the performance of government agencies. They gave the Supreme Court a rating of minus 29.8 percent, just a few notches higher than transport and worse than telephone service. Ten years ago, in the euphoria that followed Edsa, the Supreme Court topped the same survey.
The high court's fall from grace is a story of how the influence of kin and cronies, the weakness of check-and-balance mechanisms, and the fallibility of officials can erode the credibility of institutions. It reveals the porousness of the structures and procedures that govern the Court, thereby allowing approaches to justices that have undermined the confidence of the legal and business communities in the judiciary.
In the last six months, dozens of lawyers, litigants, former Supreme Court justices and insiders in the current court interviewed for this article expressed profound frustration with the country's highest tribunal. It is, they like to joke, the "best supreme court that money can buy."
They paint the picture of a powerful institution prey to equally powerful temptations: As the economy grows and the stakes involved in legal disputes are higher than ever before, litigants are willing to pay a steep price for favorable decisions.
Narvasa strongly disagrees with this perception. "We know of no instance of what might be described as a 'venal or corrupt approach' to any member of the Court," he said in a recent letter in response to journalists' queries.
True, corruption charges are difficult to prove. The approaches to justices are said to be discreet and indirect, made largely through trusted relatives and intermediaries. Moreover, the rumor mill is constantly fed by stories from litigants and an executive branch engaged in a battle of wills with the Supreme Court, which has ruled against Malacaññang in landmark cases.
"I have no personal knowledge of anyone actually having been bought in the Supreme Court," said former Justice Florentino Feliciano, who retired in 1995. "When lawyers lose a case, the immediate reaction is that the judge has been bought."
But in interviews, litigants and lawyers described to us how, once high-stake cases are elevated to the Supreme Court, the parties involved maneuver behind the scenes to get access to the justices assigned in order to plead their case. While many of the justices, they said, cannot be approached or corrupted, some of them have allegedly accepted significant sums for favorable decisions.
Intermediaries -- former justices, relatives of current justices, well-positioned lawyers -- allegedly play a key role in these maneuvers by acting as channels for otherwise unapproachable magistrates. Our interviews have revealed the emergence of a network of brokers composed of well-connected individuals who offer to fix cases for a price.
"Some former justices and sons of justices can be retained to pursue cases," said Eduardo de los Angeles, former Philippine Stock Exchange president and senior partner in one of the country's biggest law firms, who balks at the practice. "You can tell your client or you can approach them directly yourself. Litigants continue with their lawyers and as an added facility, get some of these former justices to work incognito."
This informal network of fixers who can be approached by litigants means that while lawyers slug it out in court in big-league cases, an even more bruising battle is going on behind the scenes, as brokers try to influence justices on behalf of opposing parties. Lawyers say that the role of intermediaries is so important that often, it is a race between the parties on who gets to the most influential fixers ahead of his rival.
When former Quezon Rep. Bienvenido Marquez, for example, thought he would lose his case in the Supreme Court, he was advised by a friend, a Malacaññang official whom he declined to name, to seek the help of Gregorio "Ogie" Narvasa II, a lawyer who is also the chief justice's son.
The Malacaññang official claimed to be in the know about the Court, the former congressman recalled recently. "So I talked to Ogie," he recounted. "I said, whatever the terms, just tell me."
Ogie seemed interested, but two days later, said Marquez, he sent word through a common friend that he had to decline as his partner had already been hired by the congressman's rival, Quezon Governor Eduardo Rodriguez.
Asked why he decided to hire Narvasa's son, Marquez replied: "They're not good lawyers. They're just ordinary lawyers. But because his father is the chief justice, everybody approaches him."
Rodriguez apparently thought the same thing. Sources close to him say that the governor, through an intermediary, offered money so Ogie would intercede for him.
Ogie Narvasa admitted both parties approached him, but denied helping or receiving a fee from either one. It was not the first time, he said, that litigants had come to him. "All of them obviously want to win their case," he said. "They ask me what I can do. They present the problem to me. I tell them immediately, I can't do anything. I can't influence my father and I certainly cannot talk to the other justices."
"What has happened here is people have the perception that our courts can be paid," he added, "so what they do, to even the playing field, they come to see me first so that the other party cannot talk to me."
Lawyers say that the higher the stakes, the more determined the approaches to justices. When former Justice Jose C. Campos Jr. was assigned to pen the decision on the "Beer na Beer" case, he was hounded by several friends he had not seen in decades, all of them interceding on behalf of tycoon Lucio Tan.
In 1988, San Miguel Corp. sued Tan's Asia Brewery Inc. for copying the size, shape and color of its famous beer bottle. In 1990, the case went to the Court of Appeals. It was raffled to Campos, who was asked to rule on whether Tan's firm was guilty of unfair competition and of infringing on San Miguel's trademark.
"What puzzled me was this," Campos recalled recently. "I have very few Chinese friends and they do not know Lucio Tan. Suddenly, one of them called me and he said Lucio Tan was in his house." The tycoon, his friend was told, wanted to meet with the justice.
Well known for his independence and outspokenness, Campos refused. Later, Tan sent word through the justice's friend that he had already spoken to the two other justices who made up the division and they had agreed to decide in the tycoon's favor.
"I was the only one who had not been talked to, and he was willing to give me double of what he gave the other two," said Campos. The two justices had been offered the equivalent of their retirement pay or roughly P2.5 million each, he said.
Antonio Ocampo, in-house counsel for Asia Brewery, denied knowledge of this incident. "If there was such an offer, either real or imagined, it didn't come from us, it was not authorized, not solicited," he said.
Eduardo Ceniza, who lawyered for Asia Brewery in the case, added, "Everybody knows Justice Campos cannot be bought. Everyone on our side knew that, so why even make an attempt?"
Campos decided against Asia Brewery and two other justices of the five-member division he headed voted with him. Months later, he was promoted to the Supreme Court, which eventually reversed his decision. Narvasa denies there was ever pressure on high court justices. But, said Campos: "They waited until I retired." The decision was dated July 5, 1993. Campos had retired three months earlier, on April 13.
"If Asia Brewery lost this case, this would have been the end for them," said Lorna Patajo-Kapunan, San Miguel's lawyer. "They would have to close their whole production line, destroy all the bottles, the molds and all their advertising materials and start from scratch."
Even at the trial court, she said, a bidding war was already taking place. She recalled being approached by a person who claimed to have been sent by the judge assigned to the case. The judge would decide in San Miguel's favor if the company gave him P3 million, the emissary said. San Miguel refused to pay, and it lost the case.
But many times, the approaches to justices do not involve money, lawyers whom we have interviewed said. As justices have heavy caseloads, litigants approach them merely to plead that their motions or briefs be read.
Not all justices, however, can be approached. When they were in the Supreme Court, former Justices Florentino Feliciano and Isagani Cruz recalled, there were always lawyers or litigants trying to see them. "A great deal depends on the individual justice involved," said Feliciano. "I do not allow lawyers to discuss cases. The only people allowed in our chambers are members of the Court or my own lawyers."
In the Quezon election case, both Marquez and his arch-rival, Rodriguez, were actively lobbying with the Court. They also accuse each other of paying off justices.
When Rodriguez was seeking a third term as Quezon governor in 1995, Marquez tried to unseat him by charging that he was a fugitive from justice and therefore banned by the Local Government Code from public office. In April 1995, the Supreme Court defined what a fugitive was and asked the Commission on Elections to determine whether Rodriguez was one.
At this point, Rodriguez said, he was confident of winning. Although he was accused of faking the deaths of his wife and mother-in-law and then collecting on their insurance, the Court limited the definition to those who flee after being charged or convicted. The governor left the US before he was charged, so did not fall under that definition.
The Rodriguez camp believes it was Marquez who approached some of the justices first. But when it seemed that the Court could reconsider its position, the Rodriguez side began to lobby with individual justices.
"In the beginning, we were not concerned with the maneuvers because we thought we would win," said someone close to Rodriguez. "But when Rodriguez thought the other side was maneuvering, he wanted to move also."
Sometime in 1995, the governor, these sources said, was approached by Evener Villasanta, a lawyer who is the chief justice's godson and golf crony. When Marquez found out, he phoned Villasanta, who was a distant relative. "I told him not to interfere in my case because I heard that he was being approached and that Rodriguez was seen in a hotel talking to him by some of my friends."
Villasanta said he was consulted by both parties on the legal issues of the case, but didn't intercede for them. Marquez, he said, approached him first. "He was the one who pleaded with me," said the lawyer. "Sabi niya,' Primo, ako ang tulungan mo, ako ang kamag-anak mo (He said, 'Cousin, help me, I'm the one who's related to you)'."
On June 5, 1996, while the case was still pending, Marquez ran into Narvasa and Villasanta waiting for their flight to Hong Kong in the Philippine Airlines first-class lounge at the Manila airport.
Immigration records show that both the chief justice and the lawyer were on the same flight to and from Hong Kong. Rodriguez said he had arranged for Hopewell, a Hong Kong company with big investments in Quezon, to pick up the tab for rounds of golf which the two men played in the Crown Colony.
Behind the scenes, the battle heated up. In one instance, a Rodriguez aide was
talking to one justice when lobbyists for Marquez were shown into the room. The aide had to hide behind the curtains, said sources close to Rodriguez.
In July 1996, the Supreme Court ruled that the governor was not a fugitive from justice. Rodriguez won by one vote. "If we didn't maneuver, we would have lost," said someone close to the governor. "Marquez was outbidded."
But despite the golf games and the approaches through his son and close friend, Narvasa voted against Rodriguez, a fact which the governor resents, those close to him say. Marquez is bitter as well. Although the chief justice voted in his favor, Marquez claimed that Narvasa actually supported his opponent by delaying the release of the decision until there was a majority vote for the governor.
"To them, it's a continuation of politics," said Saguisag, who appeared briefly for Rodriguez in the Supreme Court. "It's gamesmanship. That is their culture. Nobody loses sleep over it. Each side was committed to do what has to be done. This is a good case of how justice is administered in this country."
THE phone rang at an office in Makati and the senior partner of a big law firm took the call.
At the other end of the line was the head of one of the Philippines' biggest business houses. He was worried about how the Supreme Court was going to decide on the fate of one of his companies, where a big bloc of shares had been sequestered by the government and was now being contested by a determined rival.
The phone call came while this journalist was interviewing the lawyer.
"I thought we had talked with those justices already," the businessman said.
His lawyer replied: "But the other side is talking to them as well. What can we do?"
What was at stake was the future of a company that was worth several hundred million pesos. The controversy had dragged on for years, with the Court reversing itself, depending, the parties suspected, on who was paying some of the justices.
By now, the lawyer was blaséé about the whole thing. "If the stakes are high and you think the other party is maneuvering, you have to even the playing field for your client," he said. "You have to pay the price."
This lawyer is not alone. All around Makati these days, lawyers and businessmen talk about the steep price of justice in the Supreme Court.
But corruption is not the only issue. Lawyers cite the Court's heavy workload, its seeming incompetence and lack of brilliant legal minds. All these, they say, combine to make a Court where laws and procedures are applied helter-skelter. They accuse Andres Narvasa, who has been chief justice since 1991, of failing to lead the tribunal toward any discernible direction or coherent philosophy.
"It's almost whimsical," said lawyer Ricardo Romulo, chairman of the Makati Business Club and head of one of the country's biggest and most respected law firms. "They seem to go every which way and I put the blame on what I discern is a lack of a consistent philosophy underlying their decisions."
Precedents, on which the entire system of law is based, are overturned with enough frequency to confound the legal profession, some of the country's top lawyers say.
"The legal system is no longer predictable and stable," said law professor and practitioner Haydee Yorac, who once served as election commissioner. "Corruption aside, there has been no effort to establish a systematic order. I have nothing against the Supreme Court overturning established decisions, nothing against reversing precedents perceived to be wrong or against the Constitution. But in most instances, they don't even cite any basis for doing so."
Narvasa brushes aside these criticisms. It is not a question of philosophy, he said in an interview, merely a matter of applying the law. In the Philippines, unlike in the United States, where "there is greater latitude in the exercise of judicial function," he explained, "what is expected of a justice is to determine what the facts are in a particular case and to apply the law to those facts... regardless of your personal feeling or your own personal philosophy."
But some lawyers charge that decisions are sometimes tailor-made for well-connected litigants - even if they are contrary to well-established precedents and wreak havoc on the conduct of law and business, both of which rely on the predictability of rules.
"The problem for us lawyers is that the Supreme Court has now become unpredictable," said Eduardo de los Angeles, senior partner in a major Makati law firm. "Our practice was to give advice on the basis of precedent, but here we now have a situation where you can't rely on precedents. There are times the Court cites precedents only to find reasons why these are not applicable."
Such unpredictability comes at a time of economic liberalization and growth and the stakes involved in business disputes are gargantuan. In recent years, the Court has been asked to resolve disputes on land, taxes, sequestered companies, patents and intellectual property, where the amounts involved reach billions.
But the Court has failed to rule with coherence and clarity on these disputes. In December 1995, for example, it decided against the US manufacturer of Lee jeans which sued a local garments firm using the Lee trademark. Emerald Garments, the local firm, had been sewing an almost exact replica of the Lee logo on its jeans, except that it added the words "Mr. Stylistic" in small print.
By deciding in favor of Emerald Garments, the Supreme Court overturned some two dozen precedents on the infringement of trademarks. It also went against the Philippines' international commitments to honor intellectual property rights.
"That was a crazy decision," said lawyer and former Senator Rene A. V. Saguisag. "I saw the logos and there really is a confusion in the public mind. It set a very bad precedent from the standpoint of law, public opinion and our international standing."
In another case involving the sale of a large tract of land in Pasig to National Bookstore, the Supreme Court's Third Division chaired by now retired Justice Florentino Feliciano unanimously ruled in favor of Lim Ket Kai, the original buyer of the property.
Two weeks after that decision was made, the Third Division was reorganized, with Narvasa as the new chairman and two other justices as new members. A month after the reorganization, the new division cited the Lim Ket Kai case as a precedent in a decision on the First Philippine International Bank case.
But two months afterward, in March 1996, the division reversed itself. It set aside the first Lim Ket Kai decision and ruled in favor of National Bookstore.
There are similar flip-flops in sequestration cases. In January 1995, Narvasa penned an omnibus decision involving dozens of sequestered companies, which said that the government's failure to file cases against each of the sequestered firms within the six-month deadline set by the Constitution does not nullify their sequestration.
But in March 1996, the Third Division chaired by Narvasa lifted the sequestration on two companies owned by Lucio Tan - Sipalay Trading Corp. and Allied Bank - on the grounds that the government had failed to file charges against them within the timetable prescribed by the Constitution.
Saying that there was a "hairline, but critical distinction" in this case, the division argued that, unlike in other sequestered companies, the government had no evidence with which to file charges against the two Tan firms.
"Frankly, I'm confused," said Katz Tierra, who has been practicing law for 30 years and is a partner in an Ortigas Center law firm. "It's rather scary. You would think, all right, this is the doctrine now, and then you read another decision and it seeks to distinguish and you can't quite grasp the distinction. So you get scared. It gets to be there are so many distinctions, it's no longer clear."
These charges come at a time when the Supreme Court has never been as powerful, a consequence in part of a provision in the 1987 Constitution which expanded the high tribunal's power to review cases.
This provision was put into the Constitution by jurists like former Supreme Court chief justice Roberto Concepcion who saw how Marcos controlled the court during martial law and so envisioned a powerful tribunal that could check the excesses of an abusive executive.
The Supreme Court has the leeway to set its own procedural rules which, some lawyers say, makes it easier for some justices to revise the procedures to suit favored litigants.
At the same time, the high tribunal's own power remains virtually unchecked: Lawyers are wary about reporting ethical lapses for fear of repercussions against their clients. The only check is the impeachment by Congress of individual justices, a long and tedious process which legal experts say is almost impossible to see through.
The 1987 Constitution also gave the Supreme Court the choice of sitting in divisions of three, five or seven members each. The Court is at presently divided into three divisions, each composed of five justices. A division can issue a decision with a majority of three justices voting in favor. This can be a formula for confusion.
"Sometimes, the divisions don't talk to each other," said Father Joaquin Bernas, former Ateneo president and member of the 1987 constitutional commission. "One principle may be asserted with one division and the opposite by another division."
In November 1993, for example, the Third Division ruled in the case of Philippine Duplicators, Inc. that commissions form part of the salaries of salesmen and should therefore be used in computing their 13th month pay. But one month later, the Second Division ruled the exact opposite in the cases of Boie-Takeda Chemicals and Philippine Fuji Xerox Corp: Commissions are not part of the basic salary and should be excluded from 13th month pay computations.
Apart from addling the public, lawyers and litigants say the division system makes the Court easier to manipulate. Most times, an enterprising litigant has only to approach three justices to ensure his victory.
But the process is a complex one. It first of all involves obtaining information on the Court -- to which division a case will be assigned and the identity of the ponente or writer of the decision. Cases are raffled to any of the divisions, which then assign the ponente, also by raffle. Some cases, especially those which involve the modification or reversal of precedents, are elevated to the court en banc, which means that all 15 justices have to vote on it.
The assignment of divisions is a matter of public record, but the identity of the ponente is kept confidential. "A few lawyers try to find out who's the ponente," said Tierra. Once they obtain that information, their "first question is 'Can I talk to this guy?' If it is guys like (Justice Teodoro) Padilla, (Hilario) Davide, or (Florenz) Regalado, then that 's it. It ends there."
The ponente is crucial. Most times, individual justices make up their minds based on the presentation of the writer of the decision. Given the load of each justice (over 300 cases each) and of each division (some 1,500 for all five justices), the members of a division cannot be expected to study carefully all the cases they are asked to decide.
"You study the 300 cases assigned to you," said former Justice Feliciano "and then hope that each one does the same thing for their cases." Sometimes, he added, unless they are assigned to be the ponente, justices cannot read all the motions and pleadings in each case.
In many cases, the majority of justices go with the ponente's arguments for or against a case. The first step, then, is to get the ponente's identity. Although this is secret, lawyers say some Supreme Court personnel sell the information for something like P2, 000. Once the ponente is known, the approaches begin.
This is why many big law offices have a two-track practice: one track to line up the legal arguments in the case and the other to lobby with members of the Court. "The key is to get the ponente," said Saguisag. "Some law offices would look for a connection - a former law school classmate, a kumpadre, a former justice, or a former associate in the law firm where the justice used to work... The game is to look for the katapat, the one whom the justice cannot refuse. In a transactional society, the katapat has some ascendancy."
One medium-sized company, for example, put a retired justice on its retainer so he could arrange access to Supreme Court justices. "The company gives him an initial fee of P50, 000 and after he contacts the ponente justice, our petition which is initially denied and practically a dead horse, at first impossible to revive, is suddenly given due course," the company lawyer confided in a 1995 letter to Saguisag. A separate payment was arranged for the justice, but the lawyer was not privy to the amount.
One businessman we interviewed believes he lost his case involving property worth hundreds of millions because he did not approach any of the justices. By the time he realized that his opponent was lobbying with the members of the Court, the decision had already been written.
The businessman tried to make his own approaches while his motion for reconsideration was pending before the Court. But he was told by several intermediaries, including the sons of a senior Supreme Court justice, that it was too late to change the justices' minds about the case as they were already committed to his opponent. The businessman got as far as talking to the ponente. Later, through an intermediary, he offered several millions for a favorable decision. The ponente appeared interested, the businessman said, especially as the offer was doubled and tripled in the course of the transaction. But in the end, the justice
turned it down.
"We've learned our lesson," said the businessman. "It's a bidding war. It's a business. It's a question of how much the property is worth to you, how much you're willing to pay... We were caught off guard. We should have bribed in the beginning. Unahan na lang."
But while businessmen can charge pay-offs as part of the cost of doing business, many lawyers are aghast. "We're very frustrated, we're helpless," said a senior lawyer in a Makati law firm. "We don't know what more to do. You can't rest if you have a case because your opponent may be maneuvering. Our ethical and moral dilemma is, you can't sit back while your client tells you, 'You must do something.' But what can you do that's ethical and moral? Our cop-out is, we tell the client, 'Do what you think you have to do.'"
WHEN Andres Narvasa was named chief justice of the Supreme Court in late 1991, a banquet was held in his honor at the ritzy Greenhills residence of a well-known businessman and restaurateur to whom he was related by marriage.
Hundreds of guests were invited. On one side of the sprawling lawn were the judges, justices and lawyers. On the other side, set apart by the swimming pool, were prominent businessmen and their wives, many of them Chinese-Filipino. The party, said one of the guests, former Supreme Court justice Jose Campos, "was an omen of things to come."
A practicing attorney for over 30 years before his appointment to the Court, Narvasa, those who know him say, is a sociable man who is seen enjoying himself at parties, playing golf with a retinue of lawyers and judges, and on occasion, dining with some of Manila's most controversial personages.
Just a generation ago, Supreme Court justices were never seen in parties, hotel lobbies or restaurants where they may run into litigants or lawyers with pending cases. The idea, enshrined in the Code of Judicial Conduct, is that magistrates should "avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities."
The chief, however, seems to love the company of lawyers and his big, sociable clan. In recent years, his social activities have raised eyebrows in legal circles. But what has caused greater unease is his association with relatives and friends who are believed to be lobbying with the Court.
Narvasa's brother-in-law, lawyer Joaquin "Bobby" Yuseco, has been accused in a complaint filed in the Supreme Court of approaching justices on behalf of litigants. The chief's son, Gregorio II or Ogie, who has set up a law practice that senior lawyers say is far more profitable than could be explained by his otherwise average abilities, is also alleged to be approaching judges and justices on behalf of clients.
In addition, the chief's friendship with Evener Villasanta, a lawyer with Agcaoili & Associates who plays golf and travels regularly with Narvasa, is talked about in legal circles. In Manila's lawyering community, which is incestuous and tightly knit, Villasanta has gained a reputation as a conduit to the chief.
Although he is employed by a major law firm and is known as a competent lawyer, Villasanta is said to do business on his own, most times at the Manila Peninsula Hotel in Makati where he hangs out regularly. A former president of the Philippine Bar Association, he was named by the Supreme Court bar examiner for legal and judicial ethics in 1995, to the chagrin of Makati lawyers.
Villasanta was not shy about admitting his closeness to Narvasa. "He was my ninong, everybody knows that," he said. "There are few people whom he trusts ... I'm like a member of the family." Theirs, he said, is a decade-old friendship, which began when, as head of the Judiciary Sports Club, he was organizing tournaments for justices and asked Narvasa, an avid tennis player and golfer, to join them.
But the lawyer denied interceding for litigants in the Court. "I play tennis and golf with other justices like (Jose) Melo and Art (Panganiban)," he said. "Some of them are my kumpadre... But it doesn't mean that because you're a personal friend of a justice you can influence his judgment in the Supreme Court."
Narvasa seems to show little discomfort in this state of affairs. "Relatives, friends, some politicians do occasionally presume to talk to us about pending cases," he said, "but the invariable response is a noncommittal, 'We'll see or we'll look into it,' or some such vague remark, where they are not bluntly rebuffed."
But, he assured, "all cases are decided objectively, without any extraneous consideration whatsoever, whether it be family relation, past personal, business, professional, or other association, or otherwise."
Narvasa's behavior has disappointed those who remember the chief justice in the heady days after the Aquino assassination when he had acquired a gilt-edged reputation as the uncompromising general counsel of the fact-finding board assigned to investigate the killing. In that role, he set out the strategy for the inquiry and pieced together an account of the murder on which the board's majority report was based.
President Corazon Aquino named Narvasa to the Supreme Court in April 1986. Taking the counsel of her advisers, mainly human rights lawyers who fought the dictatorship, she tried to restore the respectability of the Court by weeding out Marcos flunkies and naming new justices.
Today, Narvasa heads a tarnished tribunal. In March, Eduardo R. Ceniza, senior partner and head of litigation in the country's biggest law firm, Sycip, Salazar, Hernandez and Gatmaytan, wrote a letter to the chief justice. "In my 37 years of practice I have never seen the image of the Supreme Court and the court system sink to such levels in the eyes of the business community," he said.
A lawyer for a major law firm points the finger at the chief. "The problem is that this Court, more than any other court, has no leadership. The chief justice has been unable to lead the Court," he said. "He wields the power of the purse, he gives the justices all their allowances, their per diems, etc. There can be no perks to the justices if he doesn't agree. The office of the judicial administrator is also under his control, so in the assignment of assistants, researchers, etc., he also has a say. But with all these, why can't the chief justice lead? He has no moral authority because his colleagues suspect him of doing all sorts of things. And vice-versa, he suspects his colleagues of all sorts of things."
The dominant view in the legal community is that corruption began with martial law, when the judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court, was forced by Marcos into subservience. With Marcos gone, many thought that the legal system would be reformed. But they were disappointed.
Today the interference comes from business interests which stand to lose billions in disputes being brought before the Court. In addition, Malacaññang has also tried to pressure the Court in economic and political cases in which the Ramos administration has high stakes.
Ideally the Supreme Court should be able to insulate itself from business and political interests. But, said Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, who heads a Makati law firm: "The impression is still that decisions could be bought either because of material things or because of friendship or because of power...The Supreme Court has lost the element of being an independent arbiter of rights."
Critics put the blame partly on the appointment process. The Judicial and Bar Council picks out the candidates for justices, and the President makes the appointments based on its list. Malacaññang's choices, however, have been less than inspired, with the premium placed on the potential malleability of appointees rather than on their integrity or brilliance, many in the legal profession say.
"The present composition does not make for an intellectual court," said respected lawyer and law professor Haydee Yorac.
But even the Palace has become frustrated with the Court, which has decided against the government in cases like the tax evasion suit filed against Lucio Tan, the sale of the Manila Hotel to a Malaysian company and the signature campaign to amend the Constitution.
In 1993, the Palace ordered the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to conduct a secret probe on the Court. "Prominent lawyers admitted to me that they actually paid off," said the senior NBI official assigned to the case. But apart from what the lawyers reported, he found no solid evidence of corruption.
The Palace, said a senior Malacaññang official, conducted another probe in 1995, when Narvasa was accused of delaying the release of a decision banning the resumption of jai-alai to favor his eldest son, Andres Jr., who ran the jai-alai restaurant. The chief justice was also seen dining with controversial businessman Sy Pio Lato, the jai-alai franchise holder, while the Court was deliberating on the case.
In an interview, Narvasa said the meeting took place at the retirement party of his cousin. "There were hundreds of people there," said the chief, but he was put in the same table as Sy, who was also a guest.
When the Court ruled on the case, Narvasa inhibited himself but he did not release the decision immediately. He cited a constitutional provision saying that all decisions taken by the court en banc should be signed by every member who took part in the deliberations. One of the justices was then ill and could not sign.
Later, however, lawyers in an impeachment case filed against Narvasa were able to dig up 72 decisions made by the Court which were not signed by all the justices.
While the whiff of scandal wafted over the Court, Malacaññang offered Narvasa a graceful exit: resign from the tribunal and take up any position in government he chooses. But, said a Palace official, the chief justice refused.
"I think there is a campaign to persuade the chief to leave the Court," said retired Justice Isagani Cruz, to whom Narvasa had confided the offer. "It was an attempt to ease him out and put somebody else."
But Narvasa is digging in, displaying the same defiance of Malacaññang that won him so much praise during the Marcos era. In some cases, such defiance was lauded and seen as a valiant effort to stop Ramos supporters from monkeying around with the Constitution.
Unfortunately, the charges of corruption make the Court vulnerable to pressure. Narvasa's seeming imperviousness to the damage that has been done on the Court's image has also frustrated the legal community,
Neither has Narvasa done enough to clean up the lower courts, over which the Supreme Court has administrative supervision, lawyers say. "As far as we have seen," said Eduardo de los Angeles, a prominent Makati lawyer, "the chief justice has not taken any concrete steps to reform the judiciary."
In 1993, responding to widespread accusations, including those from Vice-President Joseph Estrada, about "hoodlums in robes," the Supreme Court created a committee composed of Narvasa and two retired justices to look into the allegations.
"We won't spare anyone, no matter who gets hurt," the chief justice vowed then. "We won't hesitate to let the hammer fall." The committee worked for two months, spoke to over 70 witnesses and came out with a report that was widely criticized in the press as a whitewash. It recommended the investigation and filing of complaints against a few judges in Makati but refused to entertain complaints against Supreme Court justices because they were "nothing but gossip."
Narvasa chaired the committee, even if, among the complaints it investigated, was an anonymous paper which accused him and his kin and cronies of corruption.
The committee also exonerated Justice Hugo Gutierrez who had been accused of passing off as his own a decision supposedly written by the lawyer of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co., a party to the lawsuit he was deciding. Even before the investigation, Narvasa had already cleared Gutierrez of any culpability. In an interview, he admitted that he even tried to dissuade the justice from resigning.
Responding to the public dissatisfaction with the report, 11 lawyers representing the country's top law associations wrote to Narvasa, asking the Supreme Court to create an independent commission to investigate cases against incompetent and corrupt jurists. The suggestion was ignored.
Four years later, most of the Makati judges probed by the Narvasa committee are back in trial courts, though not in Makati. One judge who was investigated was even promoted.
Meanwhile, the one and only formal complaint filed against a justice directly to the Supreme Court has been consigned to oblivion. In 1993, lawyers Ricardo Romulo and Eduardo de los Angeles filed a letter-complaint against Supreme Court Justice Rodolfo Nocon, Court of Appeals Justice Manuel Herrera and lawyer Bobby Yuseco, Narvasa's brother-in-law.
The lawyers presented documents showing that, as presiding justice of the Court of Appeals, Nocon, upon Yuseco's request, agreed to forego the raffle of a case involving a multi-million-peso real estate transaction and assign it to Herrera. The assignment of cases other than by raffle is highly irregular and violates the internal rules of the Court of Appeals.
The complaint was treated by the Supreme Court as an administrative charge, which to this day has not been heard. In November 1996, a decision was issued on the real estate case, with the majority of the justices ruling against the company whose lawyers dared challenge a Supreme Court justice.
The high court's decision was based largely on the controversial ruling made by the Court of Appeals. Among the key pieces of evidence cited in both rulings was a letter from one of the parties. The two decisions omitted from the letter a crucial paragraph that would have cast doubt on the soundness of the rulings.
Seventeen years after the case was first filed at the Manila trial court, the value of the disputed property has gone up to over P400 million. But both the appellate and high courts had ruled that it be sold to the winning party for P11.3 million, the price of the property in 1978.
In the meantime, Nocon had retired. Among the last few rulings he penned was on a land dispute in which he decided against the family of one of the lawyers who filed the administrative complaint.
The lawyer filed a motion for reconsideration and tried to get Nocon to inhibit himself from the case, which had been languishing in the Court for years when it was finally decided. But the Second Division headed by Narvasa did not act on the motion to inhibit Nocon, saying that the papers pertaining to the inhibition had been misplaced. By the time the papers were found, the Division had already turned down the motion for reconsideration.
(First published in Manila Times, BusinessWorld, Sun Star Daily, May 21-23, 1997; Manila Chronicle, May 21, 1997)
See: http://www.tag.org.ph/investigativereports/archive7/default.htm
