To be fair NO HOLDS BARRED Armida Siguion-Reyna 05/21/2010

To be fair

NO HOLDS BARRED Armida Siguion-Reyna 05/21/2010 Anywhere from 1992 to 1998, Renato Corona was legal counsel to President Fidel V. Ramos and concurrent Vice Chairman of the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission; member of the Presidential Committee on Bail, Release and Pardon, the Cabinet Consultative Committee on the Government of the Republic of the Philippines-National Democratic Front (GRP-NDF) Peace Talks, and the Cabinet Committee on National Security. He was also chairman of the Appeals Committee of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB), where I served as representative of the film industry, along with Maloli Espinosa (for TV), Celine Madamba (for the youth sector) and lawyer Ato Salud (of the Malacañang Press Office.  I don’t claim a close friendship with him. In our meetings there was much teasing and banter, especially that pre-Christmas night I was supposed to treat them to Chinese dinner at the Gloria Maris restaurant in Greenhills, only to find out someone had lifted my bag, as in all of it, my cash, credit cards and spare reading glasses, so they ended up paying for me instead. Shortly before Celine got married, she took us to Tsukiji for dinner, and Rene — which is what I called him then — showed up in walking shorts to bravely show off scars from a recent operation. He was his usual jolly self that night, although a couple of years later, meeting again as ninong and ninang when Maloli remarried, he was subdued, and perhaps only properly so, for then he was already with the Supreme Court (SC). I am asked and pushed to say more about him, and I think: What else do I know of the 23rd Chief Justice of the SC, outside of the trivia that he’s a lolo several times over and that his wife Christine Roco is closely related to movie actor Bembol? Is he as terrible as the presumptive president-elect holds him to be, given that he is Gloria Arroyo’s “midnight appointee?”... MORE   Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100521com4.html

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