May 13, 2016
Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte
City Hall, Davao City
Dear Mayor and incoming President of the Philippines:
I am writing you in order to convey to you a very important request in connection with the state of corruption here in my place, Lapu-Lapu City.
Before I may articulate my request, however, please allow me to give you a brief sketch about myself, as follows:
I am a septuagenarian and a lawyer by profession. I am not a politician, though, but I have been deeply involved in anti-corruption campaign in my place which made some people here to think that I am into politics. To underline my point, politics is not in my blood; and, if ever I join with those who are at the fore of the campaign against government corruption, the elixir that pushes me is not the fervor of politics but the feeling of compulsion to see that the people’s taxes are spent on such legitimate purposes as would benefit all, not only to a select few with political kinship with those in power. In short, my involvement in anti-corruption activities is not animated by personal reasons.
Going to my request, you may please find the same to be just a small item in your inventory of tasks to do for the fulfillment of your promise to eliminate government corruption. More specifically, my request refers to a number of counts of criminal indictment against Mayor Paz Radaza of Lapu-Lapu City before the Sandiganbayan in Manila and Branch 56 of the Regional Trial Court stationed in Mandaue City.
It may be recalled that a few months before the start of the election period for the May 9, 2016 national and local elections, the Sandiganbayan issued an order, directing the suspension from office of Mayor Radaza in connection with the aforesaid cases pending with said graft court. Incidentally, she was then the chief endorser in Lapu-Lapu City of the “Daang Matuwid” program of the outgoing president; and, for reasons not far from her being a member of the Liberal Party, the suspension order had merely hogged the headlines of both the national and local newspapers, while its implementation was freezing cold elsewhere.
My request, therefore, are only the following: (a) to please do something that would activate the implementation of the aforesaid suspension order; and (b) to please do also anything within your power to hasten the trial of Mayor Radaza’s aforementioned criminal cases.
At this point, please allow me to state that your pre-election promises has animated me to campaign for you, believing as I did that you will have no problem in replicating your success in Davao City in effecting control against graft and corruption, criminality and illegal drug. Along this line, it may not be amiss to tell you that I may have been the first to congratulate you through Facebook for your victory on the basis merely of the counting trend in your favor which I then saw to be irreversible.
Hoping that my foregoing request will find its way to your to-do list, I beg to remain
Yours very sincerely,
ATTY. ELMERGILIO N. YBALEZ
Organizer, Concerned Citizens Against Economic Slavery
