WHO ELSE WOULD BENEFIT FROM THE BAGMEN RECANTATIONS?

Jesus Crispin Remulla went on television and asked a question that, at first, sounded perfectly reasonable to me.

“Who else would benefit if they recant?”

He was talking about former bodyguards of Zaldy Co who had earlier given statements about alleged cash deliveries connected to the flood-control scandal. Some of those men have now taken back what they said, and Remulla’s question pointed directly toward former House Speaker Martin Romualdez.

I understood the logic immediately. Romualdez is one of the people accused in the statements, so of course he benefits if witnesses against him suddenly lose credibility. If I were looking at the same thing from the outside, I would probably ask the same question.

Then I caught myself.

Benefiting from something does not tell me who caused it. It gives me a reason to look, but there is still a large space between “Romualdez benefits from these recantations” and “Romualdez or somebody acting for him made these men recant.”

That space needs evidence.

The four men who withdrew their earlier statements said they had been promised financial help and pressured into signing the original joint affidavit. Their lawyer, Levito Baligod, has denied bribing anyone and has said the assistance he offered involved expenses such as medical needs.

Remulla, meanwhile, has pointed toward the Romualdez camp. Romualdez has denied having anything to do with the recantations and has turned the same development around, saying the withdrawals support his claim that the accusations against him were manufactured.

So now we have one event being offered to the public as proof of two opposite things.

Remulla looks at four recantations and sees an effort to weaken witnesses. Romualdez looks at the same four recantations and sees proof that the original accusations were unreliable.

I do not think either one gets to go that far yet.

THE PROBLEM DID NOT BEGIN WITH THE RECANTATIONS

The more I read about the eighteen men, the more uncomfortable the story became for me because I realized that the credibility questions did not suddenly appear when some of them changed their statements.

There were questions about the original statement too.

The eighteen men were initially presented through a joint sworn statement describing alleged deliveries of cash to politicians and other officials. But the Ombudsman later wanted individual affidavits because investigators needed to establish what each man personally knew.

That caught my attention.

If eighteen people sign one document containing several allegations, I want to know who actually saw each event. I want to know who carried which bag, who went to which location, who saw a handoff, who merely traveled with somebody else, and who knew something only because another person told him about it.

Those are very different kinds of knowledge.

Remulla himself had said investigators needed separate affidavits so they could identify what each person actually knew. Later, the Ombudsman said it intended to use the accounts of eight of the eighteen men against Romualdez after interviewing them individually and finding those particular accounts useful to the investigation.

That changes the way I look at the phrase “eighteen bagmen.”

It makes them sound like one group that saw the same thing, knew the same thing and accused the same people in exactly the same way. The reporting we have seen suggests something more complicated, with different men apparently having knowledge of different alleged deliveries.

There was already an example of why that difference is important.

Two of the men later corrected an earlier allegation involving Senator Loren Legarda. Their lawyer said they acknowledged that they had not actually seen suitcases enter her property, even though their previous statement had connected her to the alleged delivery.

That does not mean everything they said was false. It does mean investigators had good reason to separate what each man personally witnessed from what may have been assumed, repeated or included in a larger joint account.

When I went back through that history, I could no longer look at the current recantations as though eighteen rock-solid witnesses had suddenly become fourteen.

The original statements themselves already needed careful checking.

But that does not give Romualdez the answer either.

A problem with an original affidavit does not automatically mean the entire accusation was manufactured. A witness can be wrong about one part of a story and right about another part. Somebody can repeat something he did not personally see while still having firsthand knowledge of a different event.

That is why I think declaring either side the winner because four men changed their story is far too easy.

WHICH VERSION ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE?

This is where I started getting frustrated with the whole thing.

If the four men are telling the truth now, then somebody needs to find out who allegedly promised them money or pressured them before the first statement. If they were telling the truth before and are lying now, then somebody needs to find out why they changed their accounts and whether anyone influenced them.

There are other possibilities too.

A witness may have been accurate about one delivery but wrong about another. Someone may have signed a joint affidavit that went beyond what he personally saw. Another person may have become afraid once the investigation became serious, or may now be remembering an event differently.

I do not know which explanation fits these four men. That is precisely why I do not want Remulla or Romualdez deciding the answer for me through a television interview.

Baligod had previously claimed that some of the former soldiers were being offered money to withdraw their affidavits. Now some of the men are accusing the other side of improperly influencing them when the first statements were prepared.

That leaves us with accusations going both ways.

At some point, somebody has to bring us something stronger than another accusation.

If someone paid a witness to recant, look for the payment. If somebody arranged the approach, look for messages, calls, meetings or the person who acted as the go-between. If someone pressured these men into signing the first affidavit, find out who did it and how.

Remulla’s “who benefits?” question can help investigators decide where to look. I do not think it can tell the public what happened before investigators have found the evidence connecting motive to action.

Romualdez has the same problem when he says the recantations show the accusations against him were manufactured.

Four men withdrawing earlier statements can hurt the credibility of those statements. It can raise questions about how the first affidavits were prepared and whether the allegations inside them were accurate.

But I still need the next part.

Who manufactured them? Who instructed the men? Who wrote things they supposedly did not know? Where is the record of that happening?

A recantation tells me a witness is no longer standing by what he said before. It does not automatically tell me why.

AND THEN I STARTED ASKING ABOUT THE MONEY

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I realized I was spending an enormous amount of time thinking about affidavits when the original allegation was about public money.

That bothered me.

We are talking about alleged kickbacks connected to flood-control projects. According to the complaints being investigated by the Ombudsman, Romualdez and other respondents have been accused of involvement in a scheme involving allegedly anomalous government projects and enormous amounts of money.

Romualdez denies wrongdoing, and the Ombudsman proceedings are still ongoing. Being ordered to answer accusations is not a finding that the accusations are true.

But if the allegation is that government money from flood-control projects eventually became cash delivered to politicians, then somewhere there should be a trail beyond the memories of the men who allegedly carried the bags.

There were projects. There were contracts. Government money was released somewhere. Contractors were paid. People approved documents. Somebody handled withdrawals, transfers or cash if the allegations are true.

I want to know where those records lead.

The witnesses can help explain the trail. They can tell investigators where to look, who was present and what allegedly happened after money left one place and arrived somewhere else.

But I do not want this entire case depending on which affidavit we believe this week.

That seems especially dangerous now because the witnesses themselves are fighting over their own previous statements.

If one of them says he delivered cash on a particular date, check what records exist around that date. If he says he went to a particular place, look for whatever independent records might confirm or contradict him.

If somebody says a government project produced the cash used for a payoff, trace that project as far as the records allow.

The more independent evidence investigators can find, the less the entire case depends on somebody continuing to tell the same story for months or years.

Documents do not recant.

I do not mean that documents magically solve a corruption case. Records can be incomplete, false documents can exist, and somebody still has to explain what a transaction means.

But a record can test a witness.

That is what I want to see more of as this case moves forward. I want the testimony compared against contracts, project records, government disbursements, communications, financial transactions and whatever other evidence investigators can lawfully obtain.

Because right now, the political argument is becoming easier than the corruption case.

It is much easier for Remulla to ask who benefits. It is much easier for Romualdez to point at recantations and say he was framed.

Following the money is harder.

But that is exactly what I want them to do.

BOTH MEN HAVE SOMETHING TO GAIN

I also think we should stop pretending that only one side has an interest in the outcome of this fight over witnesses.

Remulla has every reason to want credible witnesses. His office is pursuing a major corruption investigation, and witnesses who withdraw damaging statements create obvious problems for that work.

Romualdez has every reason to question those witnesses. They accuse him of serious wrongdoing, he denies those accusations, and anything that weakens their credibility helps him challenge the case against him.

Those interests explain why both men are speaking so forcefully.

They do not tell me who is telling the truth.

That is why I keep getting stuck on Remulla’s question.

“Who else would benefit if they recant?”

Romualdez benefits. I can see that.

But somebody benefiting from an event is only the beginning of an investigation into motive. It cannot replace the evidence showing who actually did what.

The same rule has to apply in the other direction.

Romualdez can point to the recantations and say they expose problems in the accusations against him. That is fair territory for his defense.

But four changed statements do not automatically erase every other witness, every document, every project, every financial record or every allegation still being examined.

Investigators have to do the harder work of separating the reliable parts from the unreliable ones.

I think that is where this story really is right now.

We have witnesses whose original statements already required individual checking. We now have some of those witnesses withdrawing what they said and making new accusations about how the earlier statements came about.

Remulla thinks the recantations point toward Romualdez. Romualdez thinks they point toward a manufactured case.

I am not prepared to make either jump.

Show me who contacted the witnesses. Show me the money if money changed hands. Show me the communications if somebody gave instructions.

And while everyone is fighting over the affidavits, keep following the flood-control money too.

Because the question this investigation eventually has to answer is much bigger than why four men changed their story.

Did public money meant for flood-control projects become kickbacks? If it did, where did that money go, who handled it, who received it, and what evidence proves it?

That is what I want answered.

Until then, “Who else would benefit?” is a good question.

It just is not an answer.