Smoke, mirrors commission

Smoke, mirrors commission | Daily Tribune

The ICI was built with the power to investigate, subpoena, gather evidence and recommend criminal, civil, or administrative action, though it could not prosecute, which meant that its findings went to the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice (DoJ).

It had a chairman, commissioners and, distinct from the commissioners, an investigator brought in separately to run the fact-finding.

For roughly two weeks, the investigative apparatus of the much-heralded body worked as designed. A memorandum of agreement with the Philippine National Police and close coordination with the bar association and the civil engineers institute made evidence start to move.

Then, without much explanation, the mood changed. The investigator, who got too close to the flame — like the moth in Jose Rizal’s story that burned its wings and fell — was relegated to being an adviser.

Resignations happened soon after among the prominent characters who were made to believe that the ICI was created with the serious intention of weeding out crooks from the government. They spent careers in credible institutions and knew how quietly things were usually handled in the government.

The resignations eroded public confidence in the body, which limped on for months afterward, its output narrower than its mandate implied. Throughout its existence, the ICI faced criticism, including from one of its own former commissioners, over its perceived lack of power and resources, and over its supposed lack of independence and transparency.

By the end, it was operating on a skeleton crew with chairman Andres Reyes Jr. carrying the mandate alone.

Reyes closed the commission out with the language of completion. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the ICI’s task had been fulfilled; Reyes echoed that, pointing to referrals sent out for further action and three new fraud detection information systems.

EO 94 carried a sunset provision in which the ICI’s existence depended on Marcos’ discretion, allowing him to close an investigative body the moment its findings became inconvenient and call it a graduation rather than a termination.

A commission that answers to the discretion of the office it might implicate was never structurally positioned to finish that job on its own terms.

The ICI ran for six months, was quietly hollowed out from the inside within its first month.

The strongest evidence that the ICI was undermined from within was in the six weeks between its creation and its emasculation.

The announcement to clip the investigator’s wings came via a press briefing convened, of all times, on a holiday, which meant that the ordered shift was done in haste.

The three commissioners left behind were credentialed people: a retired justice, a former Cabinet secretary, an accounting firm partner, but none of them were investigators.

An independent review of the ICI’s own reports and referrals found the commission’s job appeared far from over.

The ICI was dismantled the moment that it failed as a diversion tool to keep the heat away from the real culprit of the biggest syndicated raid of the national treasury.