PRESIDENT GLORIA Macapagal-Arroyo’s administration deployed the full force of the state’s police powers on Rodolfo Noel Lozada Jr., key witness in the Senate inquiry into the $329-million national broadband contract, when the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) sent an agent to his former office in search of documents which the government intends to use against him for corruption charges.

Lozada described the search conducted by NBI agent Marlon Tauli at Philippine Forest Corp. (Philfrest) in Taguig City as a “raid.” “They opened my cabinets, they took out my personals stuff,” Lozada said. “They were moving with lightning speed.”

Allan Contado, chief of the NBI’s anti-graft division, denied that the intervention was a raid. He said Tauli went to Philforest with a request for certified true copies of certain documents. He said, “it was not a raid, only one agent went there and he was even unarmed.”

Contado admitted that the agent did not serve a search warrant. He claimed that Philforest was a government office and the NBI coordinated the search with Philforest officials.

The “request” was given to Philforest officials who then turned over the documents to agent Tauli. Contado said there were no orders from Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez to search the office; he sent the agent on his own initiative. He said the NBI used the information it obtained from the Senate investigation as the basis for the “request,” as part of the NBI’s fact-finding and document-gathering efforts. “We secured copies of the documents so we could validate allegations of corruption against Lozada,” he said.

The NBI was apparently overzealous in searching for documents on corruption by Lozada. And the one-sidedness of the NBI’s initiative is pronounced by the fact that it is not taking any effort to search for evidence against officials and people close to the Palace, like former Commission on Elections Chair Benjamin Abalos who, Lozada alleged at the Senate hearings, brokered the broadband contract with China’s ZTE corporation and demanded kickbacks.

Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said government actions against Lozada would show there are no “sacred cows” in the government, given that Lozada was chief executive officer of Philforest, which is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Lozada quit his post last week after he disclosed at an early-morning press conference — and later testified at Senate hearings — the alleged kickbacks and fat commissions sought by officials in the national broadband network (NBN) transaction with China’s ZTE Corp., which the administration cancelled after it was embroiled in a corruption scandal.

The NBI’s intervention represented the latest action mounted by the administration to demolish Lozada’s credibility. Lozada said at the Senate inquiry that on Feb. 5, upon his return from Hong Kong, he was abducted at the international airport by a group of armed men, whom he identified as soldiers and police agents in civilian clothes, in an attempt to prevent him from testifying at the Senate hearings on the ZTE-NBN deal. He tagged his former boss, Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Lito Atienza as the one who arranged his departure to London via Hong Kong for a Global Fuel Conference, which he could not have attended for lack of a United Kingdom visa.

His four abductors took him to a car for a trip of more than four hours to an unknown destination in Laguna, after which he was brought back to Manila to his family who had sought refuge at the La Salle Greenhills dormitory in Mandaluyong City.

The abduction has generated a more explosive issue than Lozada’s testimony on the alleged kickbacks, because it involved high-handed abuse of police powers in an apparently well-coordinated conspiracy among government officials to cover up the ZTE scandal and to prevent Lozada from testifying.

The conspiracy has caused widespread public alarm over the abuse of police powers and has sparked calls from civil society groups for the resignation of President Arroyo; from the Catholic bishops, for “communal action” in search of the truth.

The NBI search has served to heighten public outrage over the broadband network scandal.

It recalls the raid staged by the NBI at the home of Eduardo Quintero, a delegate from Leyte province to the Constitutional Convention in 1972. On May 19, 1972, Quintero, a retired diplomat, dropped a bombshell when he denounced in a speech at the convention, that he had received P11,150 inside 18 envelopes on 18 different occasions, from people allegedly associated with Malacañang. He said they were given in an attempt to buy delegates to vote in favor of a constitutional amendment seeking the shift to the parliamentary system to allow President Ferdinand Marcos to extend his stay in power beyond 1973.

Day following his disclosure, NBI agents raided Quintero’s home and seized a suitcase filled with P379,200 in cash. Marcos denounced Quintero furiously as a man “of moral depravity,” and accused him of treason. Marcos vowed, “I will not rest until I have unmasked this pretender, his masterminds and his accomplices.” Marcos harassed Quintero with prosecutions. The persecution drove Quintero to self-exile in the United States where, in December 1984, he died of heart attack at age 84. He was vindicated by the Supreme Court in 1988, four years after his death.

The process to discredit Lozada and to destroy his credibility by prosecuting him for alleged corruption has started with the same vicious ruthlessness applied by Marcos to Quintero. Lozada has no chance.

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