Napoles driver cleared of graft

The Sandiganbayan has cleared the former driver of Janet Lim Napoles of graft in the 15-count case against former Senate president now chief presidential legal counsel Juan Ponce Enrile involving the latter’s P172.8-million pork barrel.

In a resolution promulgated on Monday, the anti-graft court Special Third Division ruled that there was no probable cause to indict Fernando Ramirez, the accused delivery man of alleged kickbacks to Enrile’s former chief of staff Gigi Reyes, for the crime filed by the Ombudsman against the former senator and his purported cohorts.

“With the foregoing jurisprudential guidelines vis-a-vis another review of the records of these cases, this court holds that there is no probable cause with regard to accused Ramirez in these cases,” the resolution read.

Ramirez was implicated in the case filed by the Ombudsman in 2014 against Enrile and Reyes for the alleged anomalous utilization of the former senator’s P172,834,500 Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) from 2004 to 2010.

Apart from 15 counts of graft, Enrile and Reyes were charged with plunder along with Napoles. They were acquitted, however, in October last year due to the failure of the prosecution to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Enrile and Reyes were accused of repeatedly receiving kickbacks from Napoles, who purposely created non-government organizations to implement the PDAF-funded projects of some lawmakers — congressmen and senators — that were found to be ghost or non-existent.

Court records showed that state witnesses, including Benhur Luy, Napoles’s financial officer who turned whistleblower, said that a certain Raymund de Asis delivered the commissions intended for Enrile to Reyes’s home in La Vista, Quezon City, with Ramirez as the driver.

In absolving Ramirez, the Sandiganbayan took into consideration the separate opinion of the late Associate Justice Maria Cristina Cornejo — one of the five justices who reviewed the records of the cases — that while there was probable cause to hold Napoles and her cohorts for trial, the same was not true for Ramirez.

“Ramirez appears to be simply a driver and, per the records of these cases, had no signatures appearing on the documents relative to the operations and/or transactions of JLN Corporation,” the anti-graft court said.

Additionally, the Sandiganbayan said that even the Ombudsman “failed to sufficiently account for the supposed illegal, or even conspiratorial, acts committed by accused Ramirez.”