(Eagle News) — Resign now.
Members of Akbayan trooped to the Department of Justice on Monday to demand for the resignation of Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre.
This was following news Janet Lim Napoles was provisionally admitted to the Witness Protection Program after she executed another affidavit supposedly providing additional details about the pork barrel scam.
Earlier, drug cases filed against Kerwin Espinosa, Peter Lim and others were junked by a DOJ panel of prosecutors.
“Secretary Aguirre is a coddler of dictators, drug lords and scammers. In a week, he freed confessed drug lords Espinosa and Lim, and then gave witness protection to big-time pork barrel scammer (Napoles),” Justine Balane of Akbayan said in a statement.
According to Balane, this “proves that the war on drugs and the fight against corruption are all fake..”
“Aguirre is on a roll with giving injustices a free pass. While criminals are free to go under his nose, the DOJ has been slapping fake cases against the opposition for exposing their incompetence,” Youth resist convenor Sharmah Bulangis said.
The DOJ said it was still assessing Napoles’ affidavit so it could be determined if she was eligible to be placed under full coverage of the WPP.
In junking the cases against Espinosa and the others, the panel said the lone prosecution witness, Marcelo Adorco, was not credible and had shown inconsistencies in his statements.
The Philippine National Police-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, which acted as complainant, admitted it did not submit Espinosa’s confession he was a drug distributor in a Senate hearing in 2016, noting that Espinosa himself had retracted that statement during the preliminary investigation.