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| De Lima advised the Cabinet to stop pointing fingers and just do his job (pertaining to Aguirre) Photo credits to owner. |
Senator Leila de Lima on Wednesday scored Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II for dragging her to the Resorts World Manila attack that left 38 dead, including the attacker, a disgruntled former government employee.
In a statement, De Lima advised the Cabinet official to stop pointing fingers and just do his job.
“My message to Secretary Aguirre is this: Just do your job. Stop blaming me. Sooner or later people will realize that your, and your entire department’s sole accomplishment is persecuting and putting me in jail,” De Lima said.
I think ginagawa naman niya yung trabaho niya and if ever na may kinalaman ka dun, yari ka De Lima.
The neophyte senator is presently detained at the PNP Custodial Center in Camp Crame over drug-related charges.
“After some time, your own excuses of blaming me for every catastrophe that befalls this administration just won’t wash with the public anymore, except with your fanatic supporters whose numbers are quickly dwindling by the day because of no one else’s fault, but your and your boss’s pathetic obsession with me,” De Lima said.
De Lima said Aguirre was “shooting from the hip” when he partly blamed the senator over the fire started by a lone gunman, Jessie Carlos, last Friday morning.
The incident in the hotel-casino left 38 people dead, including Carlos, while the 37 others were guests and employees who died due to suffocation from smoke at the gaming area when the gunman set the gambling tables and carpets on fire.
Aguirre has already reversed such opinion that gave the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) in 2014 the power to enforce fire safety standards on casinos.
De Lima argued that the opinion she issued when she was still secretary of Justice was “merely an affirmation of the law” in accordance with the Special Economic Zone Act of 1995.
“To be statutorily precise about it —a habit that seems to escape Secretary Aguirre’s legal training — the legal opinion did not specifically mention casinos as exempt from the jurisdiction of the BFP,” De Lima said.
“Instead, it mentioned PEZA-registered establishments located in Special Economic Zones. A casino still has to be PEZA-registered in a Special Economic Zone before it can claim to be under PEZA jurisdiction instead of the BFP, insofar as the implementation of the Fire Code is concerned,” she added.
De Lima said such question should be asked of Resorts World, whether or not its casino where the incident took place is a PEZA-registered business.
De Lima said Aguirre violated the law when he decided to reverse the previous legal opinion.
“Secretary Aguirre chooses to single-handedly abrogate this law 22 years later without any amendatory law duly passed by Congress. He also chose to do this in the absence of any formal investigation yet to be concluded on the proximate cause of the entrapment of the victims in the Resorts World fire,” she said.
“This is only characteristic of the government he serves, a government that is selective in its application of the law, and worse, that violates the law in the absence of any justifying or exempting circumstance founded on a concrete factual basis as determined in an official investigation,” she added.
Source: GMA News
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