MANILA, Philippines – “Please stop appealing,” this was the plea of Rappler CEO and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa following the company’s decisive victory at the Court of Appeals (CA).
“I appealed to the, I think in that case, the Solicitor General, right? or the BIR. Please stop appealing. We’ve had eight years of harassment,” Ressa said during Rappler’s press conference on Friday, August 9. “For me, we have continued fighting the battle. Our legal cases, the appeals have continued. Even though we’ve won the five tax evasion charges. They’ve, again, filed it. They’ve appealed it.”
On Friday, the CA granted Rappler’s petition and voided the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) shutdown order issued in 2018 – at the height of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s administration. The CA’s decision is very important to Rappler as the order restored the company’s certificate of incorporation and eliminated risks of its offices being shutdown.
The CA decision brought Ressa and Rappler’s cases down to two: a cyber libel charge pending before the Supreme Court, and a anti-dummy case pending before a Pasig City court. The last two legal victories were tax evasion charges, where the Court of Tax Appeals (CTA) and a Pasig City court had already cleared Ressa and Rappler.
But shortly after Rappler’s legal victory in Pasig City, the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) has sought the reversal of the court’s ruling. The CTA already junked the OSG’s appeal last month. Still pending with the CTA is the OSG’s other petition that seeks to nullify the tax court’s decision in favor of Rappler.
The OSG led by Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra has a history of appealing lost cases filed during Duterte’s time, like in the cases of former senator Leila de Lima and journalist Lady Ann Salem. Guevarra was Duterte’s justice secretary.
“Well, I won’t be surprised if the SEC will take this all the way to the Supreme Court, which is the final arbiter of our cases. But I don’t want to preempt the Supreme Court. But as a lawyer, again, looking at it objectively, I don’t see any reason why the Supreme Court will reverse it. I’m just talking. I’m just talking as a lawyer, very objective for that matter,” lawyer Francis Lim, Rappler’s lead counsel said.
“So there is a remedy available to the SEC and the Solicitor General Office if they want to exercise that prerogative. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed that things will stop here.”
When asked if presidency had influenced the case’s outcome in any way, Lim said: “I have not seen or felt anything where President Marcos has tried to influence our courts of law, especially in this case… As to the former president, I don’t want to comment, to say the least.”
All charges against Ressa and Rappler, including tax evasion and cyber libel cases, were all filed under Duterte’s time.
“[The cases] also taught us this other thing of you have to hold the line. We didn’t step back from it. We were pummeled for not stepping back. But now it’s right side up again. So it shouldn’t be political. Law should not be political,” Ressa said.
Survival
Reading Rappler’s statement on Friday, Ressa retold how the Duterte-time shutdown order has impacted the newsroom. Because of the shutdown order, Ressa said banks refused to engage business with Rappler and clients shied away from advertising with the newsroom. She added that Rappler was also forced to close its Jakarta, Indonesia bureau and could not even open a bank account outside the country.
“Right after the SEC revoked our license to operate, within four months, we dropped 49% of our advertising revenue. We shouldn’t have survived 2018. But this is where you begin, you have to look at crisis as opportunity. We were able to pivot and look at, create a sustainable, a separate sustainable business model,” the Rappler CEO said.
Journalists and the media continue to face threats and harassments. During the press conference, Ressa highlighted anew the importance of collaboration among journalists.
“Every country around the world now, journalists have come under attack in some way. And I think what we need to try to do is to collaborate more closely together because the fragmented environment that social media has created. When was the time when we built on each other’s investigative stories? Right? There was a time when that was the case. We don’t do that often enough now,” Ressa explained.
“Our distribution system degrades and commodifies journalism. Social media rewards the worst of journalism. We need to maintain our quality,” she added. – Rappler.com