Monday, June 16, 2008

How it Happened

After reading some of the old articles and studying the timeline of events on the ninez case, here's what i think happened.

1) the tribune and ninez published articles that had the FRAPORT people accusing influential lawyer Villaraza, Climaco and others within the Arroyo admin of extortion and harassment. One of the evidence that Ninez had was a tape that contains "illegally recorded" conversations between Fraport and their lawyers.

2) Villaraza protested and claimed that the Tribune articles were lies. He presented two letters of apology, one from Bender and one from Stiller, to disprove the tribune article's claims about FRAPORT extortion complaints.

More here:

But while Malacanang Thursday hailed Villaraza for coming out of paid advertisements that published Fraport lawyer, Dietrich Stiller's carefully worded denial letter to Villaraza, which was no categorical denial of either the taped Fraport conversations at the Shangrila offices of Fraport, or a categorical denial of his not ever having stated that Villaraza had demanded $20 million, paid offshore to an entity in Hong Kong, for legal and political services to be rendered in the background.

3) Since the Tribune refused then to back down from their reports, and FRAPORT's statements and letters at that time seemed to contradict the tribune, it looked like a "slam dunk" for villaraza when he went after ninez cacho olivares by filing all these libel cases agaisnt her.

4) But on Oct 2003, everything the Tribune had been reporting 5 months ahead of other papers re FRAPORT's ahem... "misgivings" with Villaraza were confirmed when the contents of the FRAPORT arbitration request was made public. ninez was ahead of the curve in what FRAPORT's intentions were. her newspaper was reporting in advance what we would all later find out--FRAPORT was serious with it's allegations, that the "letters of apology" were just a way to keep the influential wolves at bay until the complaint has been filed.

So is this libel?

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