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Alliance irreparably broken

ZOOMING IN

Rudy Romero

11/16/2007

Judging from the smile he flashed for the media cameras, former President Fidel Ramos almost certainly believes that he has succeeded in convincing the Filipino people that Gloria Arroyo and the Speaker of the House of Representatives are, as a result of his exertions, at peace once more. The 12th president of the Philippines was grinning from ear to ear, like the proverbial Cheshire cat.

But Ramos is wrong in thinking that the people of this country believe he has succeeded in his peacemaking efforts. They do not. They are not fools. They know that a restoration of peace between Mrs. Arroyo and Jose de Venecia Jr. is not possible. The alliance between the two leaders of the Lakas-UMCD Party — Arroyo is the chairman and JdV is the president — which was born in the 1998 presidential elections, is at an end.

The reason for the rupture is a 44-year-old man named Joey. Jose de Venecia III — Joey’s full name — is Jose de Venecia Jr.’s son from his first marriage. Joey de Venecia has been thrust into centerstage by virtue of his being president of Amsterdam Holdings Inc., the company that put in a build-operate-transfer bid for the National Broadband Network (NBN) contract. Had Joey not blown the whistle, the NBN contract would have been awarded to the Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE Corp.

The Speaker loves his son very dearly. “I love my son,” he has told the nation. Anyone who had any doubts about the deep affection that JdV feels for his son would have lost them upon seeing the footage of television interviews of father and son. The way JdV looked at his son said it all. “That is my son sitting there, and I love him,” the head of the House seemed to be saying to television viewers across the nation.

And JdV believes in his son. He is mighty proud of Joey. “Joey has a mind of his own, and he acts responsibly,” he told the televiewers. For good measure — and this is the clincher — JdV said Joey “(was) telling the truth.”

What truths did Joey say that his father found credible?

For starters, there is the meeting at the Wack-Wack Golf and Country Club at which Jose Miguel “Mike” Arroyo allegedly told him to “back off” from the NBN deal. Needless to say, Gloria Arroyo’s husband has deemed that the incident never took place.

Then there is the $10-million bribe that former Commission on Elections Chairman Benjamin Abalos Sr. allegedly offered to Joey to withdraw his bid. Abalos has sworn to high heaven that he never talked about $10 million to the young De Venecia. But Joey is sticking, as in the back off incident, to his guns.

And there is also the statement made to him by former National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) director-general Romulo Neri about Mrs. Arroyo’s reaction to Neri’s disclosure of a P200-million bribe attempt by Abalos. According to Joey, Neri told him (1) that Mrs. Arroyo told Neri to not accept the bribe money, (2) that Mrs. Arroyo nonetheless told Neri to approve the ZTE Corp. offer and (3) that at that point, Neri considered resigning his position. Neri, cowering in fear, has refused to testify before the Senate on Joey’s disclosures, invoking Gloria Arroyo’s Executive Order 464. JdV’s son is insistent that Neri told him these things.

If the Speaker thinks his son is a truthful person, he believes all of the things that Joey has been saying, before the Senate and elsewhere. He believes, in other words, that Gloria Arroyo, her husband and former Comelec Chairman Abalos are up to their necks in the NBN deal.

If that is the case — and it must be because JdV says that his son is a responsible person — how can things possibly be patched up between the Arroyo couple and the Speaker?

The answer, of course, is that no patching up, no reconciliation, no writing-for-national-unity is possible. The alliance between GMA and JdV is irreparably broken.

JdV loves his son Joey, he will stand by him all the way and no amount of facile fakery by Fidel Ramos can bring Mrs. Arroyo and the Speaker together again.

God be with you, father and son.

(My e-mail address is rudy_v_romero@yahoo.com)