Miriam rejects Dinky nomination

Miriam Defensor-Santiago / Wikipedia Photo

MANILA — Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago expressed her opposition to Social Welfare Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Soliman’s nomination before the bicameral Commission on Appointments.

Santiago said that she never really approved the nomination from the beginning because according to her, Soliman was a “fervent devotee of President Arroyo.”

“All of a sudden, on her way to Emmaus, she heard a voice telling her that President Arroyo is allegedly corrupt. Conveniently, she then turned her back on her erstwhile patron and ran to the other side of the street to join President Aquino’s daang matuwid,” Santiago said in a letter to Rep. Conrado Estrella III

The senator is also thinking of invoking Section 20 of the CA Rules to suspend consideration of Soliman’s nomination as Department of Social Welfare and Development secretary, a plan she expressly stated in the letter.

She also added that Soliman cannot retain her post just because she is now strongly denouncing her former boss adding that Soliman should be satisfied with one term under the former president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Santiago also revealed that a Palace insider told her that Soliman “felt free to denounce” her “integrity” after she voted not to open an envelope of bank documents during the impeachment trial of then President Joseph Estrada.

“I was a judge in the Estrada impeachment case, and I voted against opening the second envelope. Ms. Soliman and her ilk immediately seized this incident as proof that I was pro-Estrada, and therefore corrupt. Eventually, the second envelope was opened, and the glee concert failed to emit a peep when it turned out that they were wrong because there was nothing incriminatory in the second envelope,” Santiago said.

“These people are dangerous,” Santiago said in a CA hearing adding that Soliman and her “ilk of Manichaeism” is “an obsolete attitude based on the supposed primeval conflict between light and darkness, where the most vocal proclaim themselves to be the personification of light, and their victim as the personification of darkness.”

Soliman, who was re-appointed by President Aquino in 2010, was a former member of the Hyatt 10 who called for President Arroyo’s resignation during the 2005 “Hello Garci” scandal.

The Hyatt 10 was composed of the former administration’s officials who resigned on their post on July 8, 2005 because of the wiretapping incident.

With reports from ABS-CBN