MANILA, Philippines — The leader of a team of elite police officers allegedly involved in the switching of some 6,000 election returns (ERs) used in the 2004 polls Friday admitted that he had no personal knowledge on claims that former First Gentleman Miguel “Mike” Arroyo was the financier of the group for the operation.
In a press conference at the Department of Justice (DoJ), Senior Superintendent Rafael Santiago said he just overheard the information that Mr. Arroyo funded the Batasan Pambansa break-ins from January to February 2005 from another person, insisting he had no personal knowledge on the involvement of the former first gentleman.
“I don’t have any knowledge but we heard that from a certain person who later, maybe through the effort of the DoJ, will establish that, but as far as personal knowledge, I don’t know anything about it,” Santiago told reporters after a closed-door meeting with De Lima.
Pressed as to who this person was, Santiago replied: “As I said, we cannot give details of the facts surrounding it because we are refrained by the DoJ until we submit [our] statements.”
On Thursday, Justice Secretary Leila De Lima said the joint DoJ and Commission on Elections (Comelec) panel will ask Mr. Arroyo to appear before them in light of the revelations made by Santiago, a member of the police Special Action Force (SAF), that the first gentleman allegedly funded the break-in at the Batasan Pambansa building to steal election returns for the 2004 elections.
We've always known that in each election there's cheating, but the scale of it in 2004, based on the various bits and pieces that we've been getting from our sources... it's really mind-boggling," de Lima told reporters.
She said Arroyo's win could not be overturned by a finding of fraud, but the evidence could be used to file criminal charges against those involved.
De Lima said the police officer would testify at the inquiry next week that he and a small group of other policemen were ordered by their superiors to swap legitimate election papers kept at parliament in Manila with fake ones.
The documents recorded the votes obtained by the presidential candidates per precinct.
At the time of the alleged parliamentary break-in, Arroyo was facing the prospect of a vote recount following allegations of cheating from her main rival, Fernando Poe.
De Lima said returns recording 1.2 million votes had allegedly been swapped, and Arroyo's eventual winning margin was just over 1.1 million votes.
She said the policeman, Senior Superintendent Rafael Santiago, and four of his men who claimed to be involved had already presented their allegations to the justice department and requested state protection.
Arroyo survived two parliamentary impeachment efforts in 2005 in 2006, as well as a bloodless military revolt, over allegations of vote fraud.
She has consistently denied any illegal activities during her near-decade in power that ended in June last year, when she was required by constitutional term limits to step down.
Her successor, Benigno Aquino has said he will relentlessly pursue allegations of vote fraud and corruption against Arroyo, but his efforts have so far produced few results.
His attempt to launch a "Truth Commission" to probe alleged Arroyo misdeeds was blocked by the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, Arroyo remains a member of parliament after winning a Lower House seat in last year's elections.
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