Melo washes hands off leaked SC ruling

Commission on Elections (Comelec) chairman Jose Melo on Tuesday washed his hands off the alleged leakage of the Supreme Court’s decision favoring government's deal with a private consortium to automate next year’s elections. In his comment filed before the SC, Melo said the information came from a Manila Times reporter who texted him twice on September 8 to get his side on the court’s decision on the P7.2 billion automation contract. "I, therefore, had no copy of a decision of the honorable court to leak. I gave out no information not already known to the media about an alleged decision. I merely reacted to queries about a supposed decision," Melo said. “Obviously some sectors in the media had information about a supposed decision before I gained knowledge regarding the same, as verily, I got information from people in the media, or learned it from the media," he added. Melo, a retired SC associate justice, came under fire early this month after he allegedly bared to the media an unpromulgated and unreleased SC ruling favoring the commission’s 2010 poll automation project. Last September 8, Melo told reporters that 11 justices voted for the contract, three others dissented, while one was out of the country when the supposed voting took place. The ruling, however, was promulgated on September 10. A court decision becomes final and official only after promulgation. Citizens group Concerned Citizens Movement (CCM) had asked SC to probe Melo and find out how he obtained advance information on the ruling. It was also the CCM, represented by lawyer Harry Roque, which asked the SC last July 9 to nullify the automatoim deal signed by the Comelec and the Smartmatic-Total Information Management consortium. The CCM claimed that the contract was riddled with irregularities, including violations of the law on poll automation, and thus have to be canceled before it results in heavy losses for the country next year. - with Carlo Lorenzo, GMANews.TV