Leila: Aguirre evidence as fake as his toupee

MANILA, Philippines – They’re becoming more absurd and unreal like her accuser’s toupee, said Sen. Leila de Lima yesterday of the supposed new evidence on her drug links gathered by Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II.

“Secretary Aguirre’s alleged evidence against me is like his toupee, his wig – fake and cosmetic only. There is nothing into it other than that. Nothing’s authentic,” De Lima said in a statement.

She said she felt like stooping down to the level of her accusers – at least for once – just to stress her point that she was being pilloried with accusations based on lies and falsehood. It was a matter of giving her accusers a dose of their own medicine, she stressed.

“What is real however are the killings. What is tragic is that these killings continue unabated.  And the criminals, including these so-called vigilantes, are getting bolder; while the victims are getting younger,” De Lima said.

In an interview with reporters later yesterday, De Lima said President Duterte and his allies are getting desperate because they could not get any solid evidence to back up their claims about her being involved in illegal drugs.

She scoffed at allegations that millions of pesos in drug money went to several bank accounts that allegedly belonged to her but were not in her name.

She revealed she had information the Anti-Money Laundering Council found no “adverse or negative findings” against her. As a result, her accusers – especially Aguirre – were saying her secretaries and staff have offered to provide evidence against her.

“I’ll say this again, I have no dummy accounts in the name of any person whether close to me or not,” she added.

“I challenge him to remove his wig. If you can’t do it and if you’re convinced that those bank accounts are really mine even if they’re not in my name, then have those accounts frozen,” she said in Filipino.

But De Lima said the banks would not freeze those accounts as none of those accounts belonged to her.

On insinuation that she was sleeping with convicted kidnapper Jaybee Sebastian inside the New Bilibid Prison, De Lima that this was “one of the big lies.”

“They’re making me appear as if I’m a paid sex worker. That is a big lie. Why is the President so fixated on my sexual life? Their making me appear that I am a sexually prolific woman. Doesn’t he want me to have sexual life? But I totally deny that, the insinuation that there is something between me (and Sebastian),” De Lima said.

The senator said she was appealing to the “decent men and women” around the President to advise him to put an end to his “singular obsession to destroy me.”

“Because I’m not the one being destroyed here, he is the one being destroyed because he is stooping so low,” she said.

De Lima expressed belief that many of these “evil men and women” have been goading the President to go all out against her.

She said these people were exploiting the President’s personal grudge against her because of her having launched an investigation into the Davao death squad in 2009 when she was still head of the Commission on Human Rights.

While declining to name names, De Lima said some of the personalities involved in destroying her name could be among those charged in the pork barrel scam.

“Their weaving lies is too much, uncontrollable. They exploited the President’s personal vendetta against me to the hilt and it’s the President who is being damaged, I’m not the one being damaged here,” De Lima pointed out.

 “I can take this, I can handle myself, I can defend myself in any forum but it’s the President who’s getting humiliated especially before the eyes of the world,” she said.