TWO executives of Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. will automatically be freed from detention when Congress goes on sine die adjournment early next month.
Senate President Vicente Sotto III said Mohit Dargani, Pharmally treasurer/secretary, and Linconn Ong, company director, will be released on June 3, the start of the sine die adjournment of both houses of Congress.
Roy Kapunan, the Pharmally executives’ legal counsel, said his clients should have been released earlier after the Blue Ribbon committee came out with a “committee report sometime in February this year.”
The committee came out with a partial draft report days after the last hearing was held on January 27. But it was signed by only eight of the 11 committee members, the reason it cannot be brought to the plenary for debates.
Sotto said committee chair Sen,. Richard Gordon “will report it” before June 3.
Congress will resume sessions on May 23 but will convene itself into the National Board of Canvassers the following day for the presidential and vice presidential elections.
Sotto earlier said they expect the winners to be proclaimed in three days, thus will hopefully give the Senate five more days (May 30 to June 3) to tackle important legislative matters before going on sine die adjournment.
Kapunan said the panel “deliberately and purposely” characterized its report as “preliminary” in “order to circumvent the Balag doctrine” which states that resource persons cited in contempt should be released upon the issuance of a committee report.
“We feel that the committee chairman consciously came up with such scheme to keep my clients in jail for as long as he could. Nonetheless, my clients will come out of jail on June 3, 2022 with their heads held high – unbroken and unbowed,” Kapunan said in a statement.
Ong was ordered by the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee arrested and detained at the Senate building in September 2021 after he was cited in contempt by Sen. Richard Gordon, panel chairman, for refusing to fully cooperate with the probe on the alleged overpriced COVID-19 item their company supplied to government. He was transferred to the Pasay City Jail in November last year.
Dargani was arrested in November last year with his sister Twinkle, who is Pharmally president, on board a chartered plane at the Davao International Airport, as they were about to fly to Malaysia. The siblings were earlier cited in contempt for their refusal to submit Pharmally financial documents asked by the Blue Ribbon committee.
