MANILA, Philippines (AP): A Philippine senator was arrested Monday on a charge of plunder after he allegedly pocketed a huge kickback in a flood-control project. It is the latest crisis to hit the country's Senate, the upper chamber where a battle for control of the country's political future is playing out.
The special Sandiganbayan anti-graft court had initially issued a warrant for Sen. Jinggoy Estrada’s arrest on Friday on a graft charge. He surrendered but was soon released on bail.
The new charge for which he was arrested Monday carries no right to bail.
Estrada, 63, has strongly denied allegations, mainly by a former government public works engineer, that he received more than 570 million pesos ($9.3 million) in kickbacks from flood control projects.
Estrada had earlier told reporters at the Senate that he would surrender to authorities after receiving the warrant. Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla and police forces took him into custody at the chamber.
"There will be no special privileges,” Remulla said of Estrada and his other co-accused, including former Public Works Secretary Manuel Bonoan, who was separately placed under arrest.
Estrada suggested that the corruption cases he was facing and his arrest were a result of his being aligned with the camp of former President Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, incumbent Vice President Sara Duterte, a former ally but now an arch political rival of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
"I will not yield to threats. I will not be intimidated,” Estrada told reporters at the Senate. "I will not be pressured into surrendering my independence of judgement."
The senator was an actor like his father, former President Joseph Estrada. Both have been previously detained on other corruption-related charges.
Several other senators and members of the House of Representatives have been implicated in the flood control anomalies in a poverty-stricken Asian archipelago that is among the most vulnerable to deadly floods and typhoons.
With Jinggoy Estrada’s arrest, two senators in the 24-member chamber would now be effectively sidelined by legal troubles.
Another senator, Ronald dela Rosa, has gone into hiding after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest for an alleged crime against humanity.
Dela Rosa was a former national police chief who enforced a brutal anti-drugs crackdown under then-President Rodrigo Duterte that left thousands of mostly low-level suspects dead. The unprecedentedly large numbers of killings alarmed Western governments.
Duterte, who stepped down in 2022 after his stormy six-year term, was arrested last year on orders of the ICC and flown to the Netherlands, where he was detained and will face trial for alleged crimes against humanity starting in November over some of the killings.
Duterte and dela Rosa have denied any wrongdoing but Duterte had repeatedly threatened drug suspects with death.
The absence of Estrada and dela Rosa is a setback to Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, also an ally of the Dutertes, who recently captured the Senate presidency with a slim majority. With the two out of the Senate, the remaining 22 senators are evenly split between Cayetano’s camp and his rivals.
The numbers are crucial because the Senate will start to put Vice President Sara Duterte on trial in July after she was impeached on May 11 by the House of Representatives, which is dominated by the president’s allies.
Sara Duterte, who has announced her plans to seek the presidency in 2028, was impeached on criminal allegations, which include unexplained wealth and threatening to have the president, his wife and a former House speaker assassinated if she herself were killed due to their political disputes.
She has denied the allegations. If she is convicted by the Senate with the required two-thirds vote of the chamber’s membership, she will be barred permanently from holding public office. -- AP
