(Eagle News)–The Office of the President has affirmed the dismissal of Deputy Ombudsman Melchor Carandang.
Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea confirmed this in a radio dzmm interview on Monday, June 3.
According to Medialdea, the OP denied Carandang’s motion for reconsideration because it merely contained the same argument that the OP already found “unpersuasive” in an earlier decision.
Carandang had contested the OP’s jurisdiction over his case.
According to Medialdea, they “also found his belated attempts to explain his misleading disclosures to the media, which was the basis of the charges against him, to be similarly unpersuasive.”
He said Carandang’s explanations were found to be “mere afterthoughts and to be overly reliant on technicalities that do not even apply to administrative cases being heard by the Office of the President.”
“In short, none of his arguments warranted a reversal of our findings in the earlier decision,” he said.
In its July 30 decision, the OP found Carandang, who had been accused of disclosing information about President Rodrigo Duterte’s bank transactions, “liable for graft and corruption and betrayal of public trust.”
The decision stemmed from a complaint filed by lawyer Manuelito Luna and suspended lawyer Eligio Mallari in October last year in which they accused Carandang of corruption for causing “undue injury to any party, including the government,” and for giving “unwarranted benefits” through “manifest partiality” and for “divulging valuable information of a confidential character.”
The complaint was filed after Carandang said in a media interview that his office had already received the bank transaction record of the family of President Duterte from 2006 to 2016 from the Anti-Money Laundering Council.
The AMLC, however, denied giving Carandang any such document, and said a probe into the bank transactions of President Duterte’s family had already been terminated months before.
“Clearly, (Carandang) violated the Anti-Money Laundering Act himself when he made public certain documents which were later on confirmed by (AMLC) to be not accurate,” then-presidential spokesperson Harry Roque, a lawyer, said.
