JPE urges speedy completion of report on NBN-ZTE deal

Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile today urged his colleagues - Senators Allan Peter Cayetano and Richard Dick Gordon - to patch up their differences with regards to who between them will make the Blue Ribbon Committee report on the controversial ZTE-NBN Broadband deal.

Although he believes Cayetano should be the one to write the report owing to his involvement in the investigation, Enrile said the two erring senators could sit down together to come up with the committee report

Cayetano was at helm of the Blue Ribbon Committee at the time it conducted the Senate hearing on the controversial broadband deal.

The chairmanship of the same committee was lodged to Senator Gordon as a result of the Senate reorganization that followed to Senator Enrile's ascent to the presidency of the Senate last year.

It has been almost one year since the NBN-ZTE controversy was exposed, and Enrile said the report should be done in earnest either by Cayetano or Gordon.

The current head of the said committee and the former head, however, have been at odds as to who between them will write the report..

"They can help one another in studying and analyzing the evidences and facts presented during the series of investigation," Enrile said.

"But if Sen. Cayetano is no longer comfortable and interested in making the committee report, the Senate legal counsel and the other members of the Senate can do the job," the maverick senator said.

Enrile added the Senate legal counsel and other members of the Senate should help one another in studying the evidences culled and the testimonies of various witnesses that testified during the senate hearing on the broadband deal.

Enrile, hot on instituting reforms in the Congress' upper chamber, also cautioned his colleagues to speed up the committee report, especially since the Office of the Ombudsman is expected to release the result of its own investigation into the cancelled $329-million national broadband network contract between the government and Chinese firm ZTE Corp.