“The Ombudsman has two laws at his disposal to find the “money trail” of the malversed public funds.

What Noynoy Aquino and his yellows sowed during his regime, they now reap.

Lawyer Ferdinand Topacio announced at a news forum Saturday that he had asked the new Ombudsman to request the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) to look into the bank accounts of former President Aquino and other officials charged with plunder over the controversial Dengvaxia immunization program.

The request sought is not only for the AMLC to look into the bank accounts of Aquino but also others that included former Budget Secretary Florencio Abad, former Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa, Philippine Children’s Medical Center director Dr. Julius Lecciones, former Department of Health (DoH) Chief Janette Garin and 17 other former and current DoH officials.

There is reason to probe these yellow individuals. After all, there were heavy suspicions that Noynoy and his allies walked the crooked mile while claiming to have walked the straight path.

The new Ombudsman, Samuel Martires and his investigators should probe this charge the way his predecessor did to Aquino’s political foes, which is to include in the money laundering probe, even their dollar accounts. Include too in the review the bank accounts of their relatives and friends in order to follow the money trail the right way such as not coming up with manufactured documents.

Chances are, however, that Martires will neither manufacture evidence nor coach the witnesses to perjure themselves, unlike retired Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, the infamous partisan and selective Ombudsman known for having faked evidence and for providing false testimony.

Topacio stressed that “Under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, plunder is one of the predicate crimes by which the Anti-Money Laundering Council may cause the examination of bank accounts of certain individuals and even corporations,” the lawyer said.

He added that “under the Republic Act 3770 or the Ombudsman’s Act, the Ombudsman has the power to request any government agency and department for help that they can provide by way of information based on a pending investigation by the Ombudsman.”

The Ombudsman has two laws at his disposal to find the “money trail” of the malversed public funds.

It is almost certain that if the Topacio plunder complaint against Noynoy and his yellows is meritorious on its face, Ombudsman Martires will doggedly pursue this plunder case.

During Morales’ reign as Ombudsman, Topacio along with Citizens’ Crime Watch head Diego Magpantay filed a plunder complaint against Aquino and other responders over the Dengvaxia mess.

The complaint stated that Aquino and his co-accused “haphazardly planned and procured (Dengvaxia) in gross violation of regulatory processes of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the FEC (Formulary Executive Council) and the government procurement laws at the expense of the health of more than 830,000 Filipinos who were administered with the vaccine.”

Morales never bothered to even seek from the Court of Appeals an order to freeze Noynoy’s and his yellow allies’ bank accounts and other suspected dummy accounts. It was so unlike the way Morales and the Noynoy-appointed AMLC officials that went to the CA to freeze the alleged bank accounts of then Vice President Jojo Binay, even coming up with fake news on his alleged dummies. The “dummies” were incidentally upright businessmen who just happened to be Binay’s friends. It was claimed they held for Binay a total of P2 billion in bank deposits, as alleged by Sen. Antonio Trillanes, who keeps on crying wolf, which is why he has zero credibility.

“Martires will neither manufacture evidence nor coach the witnesses to perjure themselves, unlike retired Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales.

It was all done to destroy Binay’s political chances at the presidency.

In the end, the court found that Binay had only one bank account, with only P1 million in it. There were no dummies, by the way, as claimed by the Aquino AMLC and Morales, as well as Trillanes.

The point is, if Morales could investigate a sitting Vice President on fake charges, why did she not move a finger to investigate Noynoy and his yellow company motu proprio or even act on the Topacio complaint. She was still the Ombudsman when the Dengvaxia issue was being probed by the Senate when he was President and more so now that he is no longer President.

The complaint was submitted to her office last May. She still had time to start the probe and file a case against her yellow patron, that is if she were truly an impartial Ombudsman and believed in true justice and independence.

But then again, why even bother to seek these qualities from Morales when her track record as a devotee of selective justice speaks for itself.

If Noynoy and his yellows who were protected by Morales even when suspicion was strong that they had walked the crooked mile, all Filipinos can say is: Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.