‘Iggy Arroyo is not Jose Pidal’

E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

‘Iggy Arroyo is not Jose Pidal’
Sunday, 09 21, 2003

Litigators are like bloodhounds; once they lock unto the spoor of their quarry, they stay focused and do not get distracted by extraneous factors, such as other tracks laid on the trail to mislead of confused them. They stay on the trail doggedly until the object of the chase is driven into a spot from whence it could no longer move or elude pursuers.

One such litigator that I know is lawyer Ed Escueta, formerly of ACCRA where he trained under a certain Edgardo Angara many years ago. Ed has an interesting reading of his mentor’s statement that “Iggy Arroyo is not Jose Pidal.”

We have recently seen how Iggy Arroyo, by a deft handling of his counsel and the indispensable cooperation of some senators, has managed to turn around the original focus of the investigation – namely Mike Arroyo – to himself by claiming that he, Iggy, is Jose Pidal. And that was all the Senate investigators could extract from him because he was claiming the so-called citizen’s right to privacy. Now the Senate is bludgeoned into a puzzlement, i.e., it does not know how to proceed, given the iffy right to privacy issue. End of investigation, thus hopes Iggy and, also by extension, Mike.

It ain’t necessarily so, according to Ed. The better approach – the litigator’s approach, according to him – is to bring back the focus to Mike. This can be done, Ed says further, by dismissing Iggy as a resource person in the investigation, declare him outright as not the real Jose Pidal. This way, the Senate does not bite the insidious and fatal bait of having to cite Iggy for contempt, which is what he wants all along and then bring the question of right of privacy to the Supreme Court (SC) for resolution.

The matter, says Ed, need not be elevated to the Supreme Court by Iggy and, therefore, effectively keep the Senate off the hunt. The bloodhounds, says Ed, need only to be redirected to the original spoor.

At the next hearing, Ed is envisions, his former mentor – after some questions to Iggy shall have been predictably answered ad nauseam with “I invoke my right of privacy” – shall address Iggy with a statement that runs something like this: “Mr. Ignacio Arroyo, you are not Jose Pidal. Despite your claim that you are, you have failed to prove it. The Senate no longer has any need for you. We shall now go back to your brother Miguel Arroyo, to whom evidence points, before you made the spurious distraction, as Jose Pidal. You are now excused from the investigation.”

Expect Angara then, when the next hearing rolls around, to lean very hard on Iggy’s burden of proving that he is Jose Pidal. Iggy, after all, has made the claim voluntarily; it stands to reason, therefore, that he could be asked to produce documents which he must possess or have under his control in order to validate that he is the account holder, that is, Jose Pidal. He must be able to disclose details of the accounts, such as how much came from campaign contributions and what happened to the balances of the accounts after the 1998 and 2001 electoral campaigns.

For sure, Iggy will again invoke his right to privacy and offer nothing more than a tight-lipped smile. In that event, he will have tacitly proved he is not Jose Pidal. And with Iggy have failed to show any palpable proof aside from his self-serving claim that he is Jose Pidal in the flesh, Angara will then have directed the investigation back to its original track.

Iggy need not even be cited for contempt – exactly what he had been baiting the Senate to slap him with – for that will pave the way for him to bring the matter to the SC. If the Senate blunders into this mistake, so much time will be lost, and the current keen public attention will predictably dwindle to a subliminal fringe until it is overwhelmed by other issues that somehow clutter up and vie for the public’s appetite for the outrageous, the scandalous, and the obscene. Worse of all, the Arroyos and their allies will have conceived of other legal feints to stop the hearings at the Senate, if not to lead it to an altogether new and false paper trail.

For the moment, the Arroyos and their allies (apparently only three in the Senate, thank heavens) are making the Senate a laughingstock of the public because a three-word invocation by Iggy has brought senatorial aides scampering to libraries to research on the metes and bounds of the right to privacy, stalled the hearings, and allowed the Jose Pidal named in the exposé to remain, momentarily, under a shroud of impenetrable mystery.

The Senate should not allow the issue to be brought to another forum where the Arroyos are comfortable and where the public is shielded off.

Ed correctly reads that the Arroyos, despite their external cool, are deathly afraid of the Senate proceedings, where public scrutiny, whether ones like it, is unavoidably present, unlike that of the courts where the sub judice rule holds sway and effectively gags anyone from talking about a case that is under litigation.

The bloodhound in Ed screams that the chase of the trail should be at the Senate. It is important that the senators focus on the spoor of the Lacson exposé: Corruption, involving the spouse of the President using the banking system and in shameless and shameful disregard of election laws, must be addressed with remedial legislation.


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