Lintik din naman ano? Neri case is about revelation of executive communication between the President and his cabinet official. The high court said that the communication was privileged. In Binays case there is no communication between him and any of the cabinet officials. The hearing is about his real property acquisitions which were obscene and the revelation was documentary and not testimonial. And there was nothing to protect anymore because they had already been revealed at the Senate BRC. The Neri case is not a precedent to his own case, and Mercado was not his cabinet official. Besides, in the Neri case, Justice Azcuna dissented with legal flair when he wrote: Furthermore, as I opined in my dissent in the JPEPA case, specific provisions of the present Constitution conferred on Congress an information function, apart from its legislative function, which it may exercise to enable our people to effectively take part in governance. The Senate investigation at issue is, therefore, in order even apart from the power to legislate. Justice Azcuna voted to allow the Senate to continue investigating the NBN-ZTE broadband project which was reported to be padded with kickbacks. Even Justice Reyes, who concurred in the majority result said: The proper basis of executive privilege in the Neri petition is only presidential communication privilege; executive privilege based on diplomacy and foreign relations is not valid for lack of specificity. Miriam Santiago would be writhing in discomfort seeing VP Binay presenting a case which is not in all fours with his case. Mind you, the factual situations obtaining in both are entirely different as to make the Neri case an authority to the position of VP Binay that the Senate investigation was improper. Romulo Neri had attended the hearing of the Senate and when he was asked whether the President intervened in the anomalous transaction of the NBN-ZTE Neri had invoked that his communication with the President was privileged. So the privileged communication was invoked specifically when it was asked in the course of investigation of the Senate. VP Binay never appears in the Senate and there was no specific question propounded on his person that would reveal a protected communication between him as Vice President and Mercado as his cabinet official. His anomalous property acquisitions were made when he was a Mayor of Makati. There was no presidential privileged communication between Mercado and Mayor Binay as enunciated by Justice Reyes in his concurring opinion of the majority decision. His relationship with Mercado is like between that of a Mafia boss and a mafia foot soldier.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 11:32:30 +0000
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