Once again, never again

The suspected looters are being identified, vilified together with their entitled children and their vulgar ostentation, and facing criminal investigation.

- ANA MARIE PAMINTUAN

Their obese bank accounts are being frozen, their fleets of luxury cars seized, and their private jets and helicopters grounded.

“Never again” ~a slogan against the Marcos dictatorship — is again a battle cry in mass protests, this time against corruption.

The next step for the nation is to ensure that the seized assets are not retrieved and the frozen accounts are not fully restored, and the looters can no longer go back to business as usual.

In short, there must be indictments, ASAP. forthwith, followed by speedy and efficient prosecution, to ensure that the guilty will be punished.

Emphasis must be on speed, so that the lessons about crime and punishment become indelibly entrenched instead of the culture of corruption.

We have so many laws against various forms of graft and corruption, but enforcement is nearly ghost or nonexistent. The country is also one of over 140 signatories to the 2003 United Nations Convention Against Corruption, a legally binding pact that we have yet to tap in going after dirty money parked overseas by the looters.

Apart from the budget process, now under microscopic scrutiny after the grand-scale thievery institutionalized in the General Appropriations Acts under the previous 19th Congress, public vigilance must also be focused on the legal processes in prosecuting those now facing accusations of plundering trillions from the national coffers.

Specifically, judges and justices who handle the cases must also be closely watched. A website similar to the sumbongsapangulo.PH, dedicated to the legal services, must also be set up to alert anti-graft and money laundering watchdogs about justices, judges and prosecutors, including those who have retired, for inexplicable surges in wealth or signs of living beyond their means.