Former President Joseph Estrada rendered yet another one of his incredible performances this week when he testified at a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday and casually revealed that Rep. Mark Jimenez had offered him $14 million in 1999 to help get the infamous IMPSA power contract approved by the government.

Now, in most languages that action would have been considered a bribe. Not in Estrada's la-la land. No, Estrada denied that it was a bribe when pressed by Sen. Robert Barbers on the issue. According to the former president that is not the way he saw it, citing as justification for his moral blindness the fact that many people had donated money to the Office of the President. Yes maybe so, but were their donations to the tune of $14 million and done in secret? I hardly think so.

Opposition Sen. Panfilo Lacson, a strong Estrada ally, had to pipe up during the proceedings and reveal how the $14 million bribe was allegedly divided up: "$2 million was given to Perez (former Secretary of Justice Hernando Perez), $4 million to Malacanang, $1 million 'for the boys' and $7 million (Jimenez) did not mention anymore." Not only that, but Lacson claims that the bribe was paid to the Arroyo administration just after Estrada had been pushed out of office by EDSA II in January 2001.

It's not clear at all who actually accepted the bribe: Estrada or his successor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The IMPSA contract was not approved until the beginning of the Arroyo administration, although all of the necessary document checking and negotiations on the final terms of the contract were made during the Estrada administration.

I'm inclined to think that Estrada, when faced with a $14 million bribe dangled in front of him, would not hesitate to grab it. But recent actions such as the winding down of President Arroyo's Lualhati Foundation, which had received at least 8 million pesos in donations from Jimenez, leaves one wondering as to just how clean the Arroyo administration really is.

It is ironic to note that Jimenez today is still languishing in a south Florida jail on tax evasion charges because his lawyers are having a hard time to meet the financial guarantees of his $500,000 bail. What happened to the $6.7 million in assets that Jimenez declared in his Statement of Assets and Liabilities that he filed with the Philippine Commission on Audit in April 2002? Did Jimenez spend it all in the Philippines last month, trying to bribe is way out of being deported to the US?

As Sen. Lacson pointed out in a press release after the Senate hearing, this was the first time that details of the $14 million bribe were talked about in public. That leaves me depressed and cynical about the size of the bribery virus infecting Philippine politics. Just how many more revelations of mega-bribes have to surface before Filipino politicians clean up their act? Or is Philippine politics doomed to be stuck in a quagmire of dirty and slimy operators forever? I hope not.

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Overreacting to travel advisories

The Philippine government this week went overboard in reacting to a US State Department travel advisory warning Americans not to travel to any area of Mindanao because of the threat of kidnappings, bombings and other violence and criminal activity.

Presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye denounced the advisory as "quite reckless", saying it disregarded the Philippine government's efforts to bring law and order to Mindanao, and that peace and order had actually improved in that area.

That may be so, but after the 9/11 attacks on the US, and the subsequent American bombing of Afghanistan and the current US military buildup in the Gulf region, now more than ever Americans across the globe have become targets of potential terrorist attacks.

Mindanao has never exactly been a very safe place for Americans to travel to, with communist and Muslim rebels on the prowl, ready to kidnap, ransom and many times kill foreigners found there, especially Americans. Sure there are certain areas of Mindanao which are much safer than others, but they are too few and far between to be safely navigated between.

It's a sad fact that the Philippine government does not have a good grip on large swathes of Mindanao, with some areas so hostile to government forces that soldiers dare not venture there. With that in mind, and with the recent kidnappings of Americans in Mindanao (remember the Burnham missionary couple, in which the husband was killed?), it's not surprising that the US government advises it citizens not to travel there.

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Visit the author's website at http://www.manilamoods.com to read past columns.

Arab News Opinion 17 January 2003