Lost in the frenzy created by the impeachment court’s decision to proceed with the questioning of bank officials regarding alleged  “huge bank deposits” of Chief Justice Renato Corona is the very valid point raised by Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago in her motion for reconsideration of the court’s earlier decision.

Quite apart from the need to adhere closely to the provisions of the laws on bank deposits, i.e., Bank Secrecy Law, Foreign Currency Deposit Law, and Anti-Money Laundering Law, among others, which maybe breached as the prosecution and their advocates get enmeshed in the minutiae of the “deposits”, Senator Santiago advised that the impeachment court’s decision has the net effect of revising its earlier ruling barring the issue of ill-gotten wealth from being considered at all.

By venturing into the matter of”‘bank deposits”, the court provides venue for the introduction of documents which in their totality may lay the earlier ruling to waste. It provides, in a manner of speaking, a backdoor entry to something which should not even be discussed at all. It has been barred.

As the lawyers would say, what one cannot obtain directly, one cannot then go ahead and obtain it in a run-about way indirectly. That is prohibited under any circumstance, especially if the same is going to be used in a case such as Corona is now facing.

Unfortunately, the lady solon’s motion was overruled by the Senate majority so the banks, PSBank and Bank of Philippine Islands, were obliged to submit documents as provided in the subpoenas issued to them early on. Therein lay the entanglements.

Officials of the PSBank decided to seek guidance from the Supreme Court by way of a petition for TRO and injunction. Pending the SC’s decision on the matter the Senate proceeded to question PSBank president Pascual Garcia III on the details of the accounts which he at first hesitated to reveal but after sometime decided to proceed as far as the peso deposit accounts were concerned. But not the foreign currency accounts which he deemed inaccessible under any and all guises unless the account holder himself will say so.

I would say that as Senator Santiago earlier advised, the  expedition mounted by the prosecution and their friends within the impeachment court did not really produce the “smoking gun” as they wanted the public to believe.

Of the five peso accounts, three have since been closed, and the remaining two had a closing balance as of Dec. 31, 2010 in the amount of P24 million. This is not as princely or as eye-popping a sum as the prosecution wanted us to believe. In fact, this is even smaller than the reported P25 million fee paid to Associate Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno for her work in the PIATCO case.

Definitely, it pales to the amounts allegedly “earned” over time by other members of the court, especially one who has been associated for sometime with the packaging of “big- ticket’ projects over several administrations.

What has actually been demonstrated in the two days that the PSBank’s Garcia was questioned was the propensity of the prosecution and their friends in the court to draw conclusions out of unconfirmed or intercalated statements of accounts which tends to mislead the public and even the court as to the real financial standing of the accused.         Even more problematic is the fact that the documents submitted and which were eventually the subject of questioning were procured under questionable circumstances. The question then arises: Are these questions and proffered “proofs” related at all to the complaint alleged in Article 2, specifically the matter of Corona’s SALN.

In any event, there has not been any showing that Corona has committed any misdeed or has been accused of graft at all. In fact, there was no effort on the part of the prosecution and members of the impeachment court to suggest so, which can only mean that they were more interested in skewering Corona before the public, a trial by publicity, rather than proving their allegations in the Articles of Impeachment. SAYANG.