Luy admits some documents used as evidence in ‘pork’ case not authentic

Pork barrel scam whistleblower Benhur Luy on Friday admitted before the court that some documents in his external hard drive that were used as evidence in the case were not authentic copies of the original documents.

At the continuation of the hearing of Janet Lim-Napoles’ petition to post bail before the Sandiganbayan Third Division, Luy, upon the questioning of Napoles’ lawyer Dennis Buenaventura, admitted that most of the files in his daily disbursement reports (DDR) retrieved from his external hard drive were just draft copies and not the scanned copies nor photo copies of the original documents.

“Yung mga original, hard copies of my daily disbursement reports (DDR) ay na-shred na po,” Luy told the court.

The DDR, composed of over a thousand pages, supposedly details the transactions of the fake foundations allegedly owned by Napoles with several lawmakers from 2004 to 2012.

Luy had earlier said that the “transactions” refer to the lawmakers' allocation of their Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), more commonly known as pork barrel, to the Napoles-linked foundations for “ghost projects” in exchange for kickbacks.

He and the other whistleblowers have earlier testified that when the pork barrel scam started hitting the headlines in 2013, Napoles ordered the shredding of massive documents that might implicate her in the anomaly.

But Luy claimed he was able make back-up copies in his external hard drive of some of these shredded documents, such as vouchers, endorsement letters from the lawmakers, and special allotment release orders (SAROs) under his DDR folder.

Third Division senior member Associate Justice Samuel Martires then asked Luy why he did not bother to scan the copies of the original documents in his DDR, to which Luy replied that "there was no order from Napoles."

Luy also said that scanning the documents "was not a common practice in the office," referring to Napoles' JLN Corporation.

“So we have to take your word for it that these vouchers in the DDR were signed?” Martires asked. Luy did not reply.

Upon further questioning by Buenaventura, Luy also admitted that he was not able to encode in his external hard drive some of the corrections noted by Napoles in the hard copies of the original documents.

With Luy’s admission that some documents in his DDR were not the scanned copies nor the xerox copies of the original, Buenaventura asked if he is indeed admitting that the files in his DDR were fake.

“How can we be sure that these are faithful copies of the supposed files in the vault of JLN [Corporation]? Is this an admission that these are not faithful copies?” Buenaventura asked.

Third Division chairman Presiding Justice Amparo Cabotaje-Tang, however, stopped Luy from answering and told Buenaventura to “let the court appreciate” the authenticity of the documents in relation to Luy’s testimony.

Luy’s DDR, also referred as “ledger,” was among the evidence of the Office of the Ombudsman in prosecuting the pork barrel scam-related cases pending in all the five divisions of Sandiganbayan.

“From day one, our position is that the files contained in his external hard drive especially in his DDR were just draft [copies], ngayon, finally it came from him na wala naman pala talagang original,” Buenaventura said in a chance interview after the hearing. —KBK, GMA News