Revilla bucks amendments to graft raps

MANILA, Philippines - It’s no plain clerical matter, Sen. Ramon Revilla Jr. said of the amendments being proposed by state prosecutors for the 16 counts of graft charges filed against him in connection with the pork barrel scam.

The lawmaker, through his lawyers, asked the Sandiganbayan First Division to deny “for lack of merit” the prosecution’s motion for amendment to the graft cases.

In its motion, the prosecution wants the word “sub” in the term “Sub Allotment Release Order (Sub-ARO)” stated in the information replaced with the word “special.”

The information would read thus: “DBM’s Relampagos (Department of Budget and Management Undersecretary Mario Relampagos), (Rosario) Nuñez, (Lalaine) Paule and (Marilou) Bare facilitated with undue haste the processing of the pertinent Special Allotment Release Order (SARO) and Notice of Cash Allocation (NCA).” Nuñez, Paule and Bare are office staff of Relampagos.

Revilla’s lawyers said the proposed amendment was not merely clerical but “a substantial one as it involves a change in theory on the part of the prosecution in that a Sub-Allotment Release Order is entirely different from a Special Allotment Release Order.”

They said the anti-graft court “should not allow the substantial change in the information as proposed by the prosecution.”

Citing a Supreme Court ruling, Revilla’s counsels said “a substantial amendment is proscribed except if the same is beneficial to the accused.”

“It (SC) further held that due process of law demands that no substantial amendment of an information may be admitted without conducting another or a new preliminary investigation,” they said.

They said a SARO is the form issued by the DBM to identified agencies that authorizes them to incur obligations not exceeding a given amount during a specified period for a certain purpose.

A Sub-ARO, on the other hand, is an intra-agency issuance wherein a main or regional office of a government agency authorizes its lower offices to incur obligations, they said.