Tit for tat

Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, the first national police chief under Rodrigo Duterte, conducts a Senate probe that revives stories about Ferdinand Marcos Jr. being a cocaine addict.

Senator Bato presents Jonathan Morales, a former agent of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, who tells the Senate panel that he signed PDEA documents in 2012 listing BBM and actress Maricel Soriano as subjects of drug surveillance.

Surigao del Norte 2nd District Rep. Robert Ace Barbers then announces that the House committee on dangerous drugs, which he chairs, will summon Duterte’s controversial former economic adviser Michael Yang in connection with a P3-billion shabu bust last year in Mexico, Pampanga.

A probe by the previous Senate Blue Ribbon committee headed by Richard Gordon indicated that Yang, long hounded by accusations of drug trafficking, brokered the multibillion-peso sweetheart deal awarded by the Duterte administration to Pharmally Pharmaceuticals at the height of the COVID pandemic, and served as the company’s financier.

Barbers said Yang’s interpreter Lincoln Ong, also implicated in the Pharmally scandal, is an incorporator of Empire 999, the company that owns the Pampanga warehouse where the illegal drugs were found.

Gordon, in his committee report that most senators refused to sign, included Rodrigo Duterte himself among those who should be held accountable for the Pharmally mess. Now that the Dutertes have had a bitter falling out with the Marcos-Romualdez clan, do those senators regret protecting the former president?

The buzz in the Tsinoy community is that Yang skipped town shortly after the Pharmally scandal erupted during the Duterte administration. Barbers’ panel will have no one to grill; on Monday he said other Chinese nationals he wanted to summon were found to have left the country.

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Dela Rosa seems unfazed by criticisms of his panel’s probe of the so-called PDEA leaks. He said the surveillance and possible raid on Soriano’s condominium unit in Rockwell did not push through because then president Noynoy Aquino’s executive secretary Paquito Ochoa stopped it.

Ochoa, a partner in the law firm of BBM’s wife Liza Araneta-Marcos, has twice been a