http://manilastandardtoday.com/2013/09/19/jennys-work-for-noy-1/

Jenny’s work for Noy (1)

By Jojo Robles | Posted 8 hours ago | 5,794 views

President Noynoy Aquino put Janet Lim Napoles in charge of “convincing” both the Senate and the House of Representatives to vote in favor of the impeachment and conviction of then Chief Justice Renato Corona and for the passage of the Reproductive Health Law, by her own account. Not only were the lawmakers convinced that Napoles’ involvement in these two initiatives meant that they were doing the bidding of Aquino through a trusted intermediary close to the palace, she confided; if they did what Aquino wanted, they hoped that Napoles’ business of converting pork barrel funds into kickbacks for legislators would continue unabated through her.

Corona, who was appointed by former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo near the end of her term in 2010, was impeached in the House, convicted by the Senate and removed from office, all before the end of May last year. By December, both the Senate and the House had approved the controversial RH measure, which was signed into law before Christmas by Aquino.

These were among the disclosures made to me by an unimpeachable source recently. This source, who spoke only on condition that I would grant him anonymity, is a private businessman who said he once believed that Napoles’ JLN Trading company was a “legitimate and respectable” enterprise; he had asked to meet Napoles to look into how they could do business together, especially through the government contacts of Madame Jenny, he said.

The source and Napoles met “at least three or four times,” with each meeting lasting at least one hour. At least once, the source had to meet with her for several hours, during which they were served a meal made from scratch by the personal chef hired by Napoles to cook the food that she ate.

The meetings between Napoles and the source took place between October and December last year in the businesswoman’s 25th floor offices at the Discovery Suites in Ortigas Center; Napoles had by this time already taken possession of the entire floor of the building, having already displaced the final holdout tenant, a “laser acupuncture” service that had been given concessional rental rates by the Tiu family, which controls the posh structure.

The source had been introduced to Napoles by a former official of the Arroyo administration. The former Arroyo-era official who introduced the source to Napoles said it was good to be friends with Madame Jenny “because she is very close to Malacanang.” “She also always made it clear that she was really close with President Aquino in our conversations,” the source said.

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According to the source, Napoles (or “Madame Jenny, as she preferred to be called by everyone”) was always “gracious and well-dressed,” if a little too prone to cursing in Tagalog in private. “She liked to say ‘P– i–,’” the source said. “It was strange to hear that expression so often from someone who was obviously very rich and surrounded with expensive things.”

The other thing he noticed about Napoles, he said, was that “she was always on the phone with some high government official .” If she was not talking to these important people, she had to frequently interrupt herself while talking to send or receive their text messages, he said.

According to the source, when he met Napoles in October, Madame Jenny was still basking in the glory of her supposed role in Corona’s conviction. “She said she had been assigned to talk to the congressmen and the senators, especially during the trial of Corona in the Senate,” the source said. “I didn’t have to ask her who assigned her; she said it was the President, because she could be trusted with the job of talking to the congressmen and senators.”

Furthermore, according to the source, Napoles was excited—and very busy—because she said she was doing the same job for Aquino, this time for the RH law. “There was no doubt in her mind that she could get the job done the second time around, she told me,” the source said.

But despite a feeling of mutual respect, the source said, nothing came of their plans to go into business together. “Jenny told me that she was already encountering some problems in the office,” the businessman said. He said he would later learn that Napoles was being maligned in text messages and the occasional unflattering newspaper and broadcast news article.

In their final meeting, also held in Napoles’ Discovery Suites headquarters last December after several weeks of no communication, Jenny told the businessman that she was sorry that she didn’t get back to him sooner. “I learned later that some of those senior staff of some senators were trying to discredit Napoles through text messages and news reports,” the source said.

These people, according to the businessman, were probably those working with Napoles’ relative and trusted subordinate Benhur Luy, who would become the primary whistle-blower against Madame Jenny. As Luy has testified in the Senate, he was already setting up his own network for pork barrel conversion, in a bid to cut out Napoles entirely from the lucrative trade. (To be continued tomorrow)