It’s time to charge Bolante with perjury - bishop

MANILA, Philippines — Former agriculture undersecretary Jocelyn "Joc-Joc" Bolante has been lying left and right on the P728-million fertilizer fund mess and it’s now time to charge him with perjury, a senior Roman Catholic Church official said on Thursday. "No big intelligence is needed to know that Bolante is not telling the whole truth about the fertilizer fund scam," Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz told reporters in a chance interview. He added: “For a person to lie and still be credible, he must have been extra good in memory, in logic and pursuant consistency." "These are (the) attributes that Bolante does not have much of … even if he tells the truth now, he would already be guilty of a good number of perjuries," Cruz said. He said that with Bolante's various testimonies over the P728 million fertilizer fund scam in both the Senate and House hearings, the former agriculture official had already committed questionable and confusing statements affecting his integrity. "It was only proper and timely for concerned authorities to formally charge for perjury, among others, now he is already under the Senate custody," Cruz said. Bolante was ordered detained by the Senate for evasiveness and repeated lying under oath in the inquiry being conducted by the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee. He had insisted that the distribution of funds under the farm inputs and farm implements program to Department of Agriculture's field offices was a regular yearly activity. But regional directors Leo Caneda of Eastern Visayas and Roger Chio of Southern Mindanao refuted this in their testimonies, saying this was not done in previous years and was no longer being done after 2004. He has also maintained owning only four bank accounts, but documents obtained by Senate showed that he had at least 23. He claimed to have lost his passport in the melee that marred his arrival at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport last Oct. 28. But the Foreign Affairs Department contradicted this after it has issued a certification that his name did not appear in its lost and stolen passport database. - GMANews.TV