EDITORIAL - A real tell-all?

Janet Lim Napoles is smiling these days. Last year her conviction for serious illegal detention of her cousin was overturned by the Court of Appeals. She remains in detention without bail for plunder in connection with the pork barrel scam in which she is the accused mastermind.

Now she might also get off the hook in the scam. The Department of Justice has provisionally accepted Napoles into the Witness Protection Program as it assesses her claims on her role in the pork barrel scandal.

Napoles has denied the accusations against her, saying she was merely tutored by someone else on the intricacies of funneling the pork barrel or Priority Development Assistance Fund of lawmakers to private accounts using bogus non-government organizations. Because of the complexity of the budget process, some quarters have not ruled out the possibility that she is telling the truth, and that someone else designed the elaborate PDAF scheme and tapped her for its implementation.

It also cannot be ruled out, however, that Napoles might be concocting a story to save her neck. Plunder carries a penalty of life in prison, and Napoles is young enough to serve the maximum 40 years for multiple counts of large-scale corruption.

Napoles was convicted of detaining her second cousin Benhur Luy, who blew the whistle on the PDAF scam. Alongside Luy’s revelations, the Commission on Audit also released to the public what it described as a truckload of documents implicating nearly 200 incumbent and former congressmen and senators in the fund diversion scheme. Several of the lawmakers remain in office.

The Office of the Ombudsman has been accused of selective justice for filing PDAF-related plunder cases against opposition leaders during the previous administration but sparing Aquino allies named by Napoles and tagged in the government audit report.

If Napoles is accepted as a state witness, will the nation finally get the full picture? The nation deserves the whole truth, and nothing but; this must be the objective of the justice department in assessing the application of the woman tagged as the pork barrel queen to tell all.