Business Circuit

People are happy that there are jurists who keep their sense of propriety and delicadeza. They refuse to open themselves to suspicions of bias when their kin work for one of the litigants in cases pending in their courts.

Chief Justice Reynato Puno inhibited himself from the en banc discussion of the feud in the Court of Appeals. His reason: A daughter of CA Justice Jose Sabio is a court attorney assigned to his office.

Associate Justice Consuelo Ynares Santiago also refused to participate in the discussion because her daughter works with Meralco.

Senior Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio did not want to take part because he worked for Villaraza law offices before he was appointed to the Supreme Court.

Villaraza law offices, now known as CVC law, is counsel for Meralco.

The Chief Justice created a panel of three retired justices, headed by Carolina Aquino Griño, to investigate the CA imbroglio.

The inhibitions left the Supreme Court with higher respect from the people. No magistrate is suspect of having inner motives. Nobody asked them to inhibit. Delicadeza told them to stay out of the case.

I had thought that Presiding Justice Conrado Vasquez Jr., son of one of the most respected justices of the Supreme Court, Conrado Vasquez Sr., would announce during the en banc session over administration questions involving Justice Sabio that he would volunteer information to his peers and tell them he was inhibiting himself.

He did not. Neither did he tell the Court of Appeals en banc that he has two daughters and a niece working for the Government Service Insurance System which is at loggerheads with Meralco.

Still, Justice Vasquez failed to get the en banc to come to a decision. The matter had to be brought to the Supreme Court for resolution.

The Sabio incident where he claimed he was offered a bribe by Meralco through Francis de Borja is the darkest chapter in the history of the Philippine judiciary.

Here is a justice of the Court of Appeals who would not vacate a position he temporarily occupied because the regular occupant was on leave.

Now he is talking his head off about what he said are his doubts about what the division of Justice Reyes might do to the case.

If he were the ponente, what would he have done? Whatever his ruling might be, he became suspect by hanging on to the case that did not belong to him.

A good number of CA justices resent Sabio’s projecting himself as an apostle of justice at the expense of the entire court.

Incidentally, Sabio is said to have admitted during the closed-door en banc session last week that his brother, Camilo Sabio, chairman of the Presidential Commission on Good Government called him up to say that he should not issue a temporary restraining order in favor of Meralco. But he signed the TRO just the same. He defied his brother.

Now, Justice Sabio uses his signature on the TRO as an excuse to cling to the Meralco case.

What he intends to do when the case is discussed on the merits is everybody’s guess. But he said he burned his bridges with Malacañang when he signed the order.

Yet he earlier said that he was being offered a seat in the Supreme Court and money to boot presumably to decide the case in favor of the GSIS. That is what Francis de Borja claims in his affidavit.

If he burned his bridges to Malacañang, might we make the observation that he is building bridges to somebody else?

He is known to be nursing ambitions to be appointed to the Supreme Court. If he defied Malacañang pressure, he might have lost the chance. In exchange for what, nobody will ever know. Whatever it is does not sit with his insatiable desire to decide the Meralco case on the merits.

In Justice Sabio’s own words, he received the bribe offer from Francis de Borja on July 1. Why he informed his colleague, Justice Bruselas (Eighth Division) of the offer is a constant source of wonder.

But he also declared that he informed Presiding Justice Conrado Vasquez Jr. and Justice Martin Villarama before July 25. He should have filed an administrative complaint but did not.

He should have disclosed these events to the Court en banc but he obviously did not. My source told me that the records of the session do not say so.

The need to tell the Court about any bribe offer arises from a duty to protect the integrity of the entire court.

He should have been more circumspect. But he went to media instead and denounced the alleged bribe offer almost a month after he received it.

Justice Sabio should have informed the presiding justice about the bribe offer on the day it was made on July 1.

But he did not write the chief of the court until July 26. He created a media spectacle when he demanded an en banc hearing which he knows is called only on administrative matters.

He has not stopped giving interviews to media. Does he believe that his search for what he might call justice and fairness sits squarely with tarnishing the image of his court?

Sabio’s record

Justice Sabio openly admits that he received P300,000 from De Borja for sorting out the details of the sale of a large tract of land owned by the family of the late Congressman Pedro Oloy Roa, De Borja’s uncle, his mother being a Roa.

At the time he was giving advice to the Roa family, he was RTC judge in Cagayan de Oro.

It did not occur to Sabio that a judge should not be engaged in the practice of law, including giving advice to anyone. He accepted payment for that advice.

He is a professor of legal ethics in Ateneo School of Law. The money he received from De Borja in exchange for legal advice while he was RTC judge runs contrary to the legal ethics that he teaches law students.

The acceptance of a token for his assistance while sitting as a judge may not exactly be in agreement with the Canon of Judicial Ethics which Sabio should know as a lawyer, even long before he became a judge of the RTC in Cagayan de Oro and eventually a justice of the Court of Appeals.

There is a deeper meaning to this mess. Is Sabio acting on his own? We cannot say he is not.