Sandiganbayan issues subpoena on Senate Blue Ribbon documents

The Sandiganbayan has granted the request of Sen. Jinggoy Estrada to issue a subpoena on various documents pertaining to the hard disk drive of primary pork barrel scam whistleblower Benhur Luy, which remains under the custody of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee.

In a subpoena served Monday morning, the Fifth Division directed Atty. Rodolfo Noel Quimbo, director general of the Senate Committee on Accountability of Public Officers and Investigations (Blue Ribbon), “to personally or through a representative” submit to the court copies of documents extracted from the external hard drive of Luy.

In his motion, Estrada wanted committee chairman, Sen. Teofisto Guingona III, or Quimbo to be summoned by the court to personally transmit the requested documents.

But Fifth Division clerk of court, lawyer Teresa Pabulayan, said the Fifth Division justices decided to address the subpoena to Quimbo alone.

Among the documents ordered to be presented in court was the forensic examination report on Luy’s external hard drive submitted by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) when the committee was still investigating the pork barrel scam in 2013.

The court also ordered the presentation of the committee’s own digital copies as well as printed copies of any files contained in Luy’s external hard drive.

Composed of over a thousand pages, Luy’s external hard drive supposedly details the transactions of the fake foundations allegedly owned by businesswoman Janet Lim-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 Daily Disbursement Report (DDR) folder.

However, in a hearing in another division of the Sandiganbayan, Luy admitted that some of the documents in his DDR were just draft copies and not the scanned copies nor photo copies of the original documents.

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.

The court had earlier denied Estrada’s motion to examine Luy’s external hard drive in its entirety, saying his request was “too broad and general,” giving out an impression that he was only trying to “fish” for information.

Estrada is facing plunder and graft charges before the Fifth Division for his alleged involvement in the pork barrel scam. He is currently detained at the Philippine National Police Custodial Center in Camp Crame, Quezon City.  —KBK, GMA News