Former senator Jinggoy Estrada lost a round in his court battle after the Sandiganbayan Fifth Division affirmed the motion of the Anti-Money Laundering Council denying the petition to junk the subpoena for various documents related to the court’s investigation into the alleged pork barrel scam.
In a resolution, the court division denied the AMLC’s appeal against the court’s Feb. 21 ruling, stating that the release of the documents is important to the plunder case of Estrada.
Estrada earlier asked the court to issue a subpoena for several AMLC reports and memoranda pertaining transactions of the alleged pork barrel queen Janet Lim Napoles involving the lawmakers’ Priority Development Assistance Fund, otherwise known as “pork barrel.”
Apart from being confidential in nature, the AMLC insisted in its motion the requested documents, such as correspondences, communications, Currency Transaction Reports (CTR) and Suspicious Transaction Reports (STR), were irrelevant to Estrada’s case.
It also said the subpoena was unnecessary and violative of several laws such as the Anti-Money Laundering Act and the Bank Secrecy Law.
But the court said that it already resolved in its earlier resolution the arguments the AMLC raised regarding the confidentiality and relevance of the requested documents.
Estrada argued that the AMLC’s claim of the documents’ confidentiality was baseless as the letter did not cite authority for such claim.
“More so, the said documents are relevant to the instant case since these would determine the scope and regularity of the investigation conducted by the AMLC,” the anti-graft court said.
It added: “Considering that the accused has no access to the documents sought, it is impossible for him to describe or identify the same with particularity.”
The court added that denying Estrada’s request for the documents is denial of his “constitutional right to compulsory process to produce evidence in his behalf.”
“The need for the documents and his right to compulsory process outweigh the claims of the AMLC of confidentiality, irrelevancy, and generality,”
Estrada is facing graft and plunder for allegedly pocketing P183.793 million in kickbacks in allocating his PDAF from 2004 to 2012 to Napoles’ alleged bogus non-government organizations.
The Sandiganbayan scheduled the graft and plunder trial of Estrada on June 19 and Sept. 4, respectively.
