(Eagle News) — “Illegal, unconstitutional, unethical.”
This was how Senator Antonio Trillanes IV described the Office of the President’s decision to sack Overall Deputy Ombudsman Melchor Arthur Carandang from the service.
“Not only is this illegal and unconstitutional since the Office of (the) Ombudsman is an autonomous constitutional body, it is also highly unethical to fire the very same person investigating him,” Trillanes, a critic of the administration, said in a statement.
He said he “strongly condemns (President Rodrigo Duterte’s) dismissal” of Carandang, noting that the chief executive was only “resorting to cover-up and harassment tactics” so he would not face the allegations of ill-gotten wealth against him.
In its dismissal order signed by Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, the OP said Carandang was guilty of graft and corruption, and betrayal of public trust after he issued a statement to the media in September 2017 about the Ombudsman supposedly acquiring evidence of the “ill-gotten wealth” of Duterte and his family in the form of bank transaction records from the Anti-Money Laundering Council.
Carandang, however, the OP noted, did not speak about the termination of the Ombudsman’s investigation into the President’s wealth.
“He was clearly only interested to broadcast an information adverse to the President. His keeping mum about an information that was favorable to the President clearly amounted to manifest partiality,” the OP said, noting that his intent was to “give undue advantage” to Trillanes, who at that time had filed a plunder complaint against Duterte.
In the same decision, the OP dismissed the charges against Deputy Ombudsman for Mindanao Rodolfo Elman and members of the Ombudsman-Mindanao fact-finding team for “lack of substantial evidence.”