BALANGA CITY, Bataan — Governor Enrique “Tet” Garcia said Sunday that he is not surprised at all to hear the news about the Ombudsman’s filing of graft charges against him before the Sandiganbayan.

“Why should I,” he asked, “when the Ombudsman has been doing that to me for the longest time and not a single one of the cases has ever prospered?” said Garcia.

He said that long before details of the graft charges had been released to media, his political opponents in the province were already spreading the news.

“This can only mean that despite the exit of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez, who hails from Bataan, the Office (of the Ombudsman) has remained beholden to my opponents,” said the governor.

Garcia said that they could not have known weeks before of the yet to be released decision to file the graft case before the Sandiganbayan since his camp has no inside track at the Ombudsman’s office.

Still, the governor expressed confidence that “the truth will come out and the rule of law will prevail” just like in the previous cases filed against him.

He cited, among others, the widely publicized case in November 2010 when the Ombudsman tried to force the implementation of a preventive suspension order against him only to be restrained by no less than the Supreme Court (SC).

At about the same time, graft charges were being filed against him by the Ombudsman just as quickly as they were dismissed by the Sandiganbayan for lack of probable cause.

“The present case is even worse because I have no participation at all in the transaction. It involved the purchase, for P142,500 of a patrol boat for our sustained campaign against illegal fishing where I did not get to sign a single document as it was my provincial administrator who did; of course he had the lawful authority to do that. It seems that I was charged solely because I was the Governor at the time of the transaction and such I should be held responsible for everything that my subordinates did,” said Garcia.

He bewailed that in contrast, his predecessor was charged for what was admitted by him as a “ghost project” in which he allegedly signed the contract, the certificate of acceptance of the supposed non-existent project, and the check payment for it.

“But would you believe that he was exonerated because, according to the Ombudsman, he is allowed to rely on his subordinates. Double standard? You be the judge,” said Garcia.

Garcia also suspects that the filing of charges was meant to support what he described as “the fantastic claim of Acting Ombudsman Orlando Casimiro, who wants to become Ombudsman, that he was able to dispose of some 4,500 cases in just a matter of weeks.”

Garcia said that Chief Justice Renato Corona said during Casimiro’s interview at the Judicial Bar Council (JBC) that he could not understand how Casimiro could have studied, analyzed and resolved that many cases within a very short period of time.

The Chief Justice was also quoted by Garcia as having said that with such capability to act with extraordinary dispatch, how come he had not done that before.