The Philippine National Police on Thursday released the mugshots and fingerprints of controversial businesswoman Janet Lim Napoles, the suspected brains behind the P10-billion pork barrel scam, formalizing her arrest.
Napoles was fingerprinted, and her mugshots were taken, a day after her surrender to President Benigno S. Aquino III. Napoles is facing formal charges of having allegedly illegally detained a former associate, Benhur Luy, whose falling out with the businesswoman led him to expose her alleged operation to siphon as much as P10 billion in legislators' pork barrel funds to a network of bogus NGOs.
The government is open to the possibility of Napoles turning state witness in a larger probe on misused pork barrel funds, Interior Secretary Mar Roxas told reporters past midnight Thursday.
But the notion stirred a hornet's nest within and outside legal circles, with her accusers calling her the "most guilty" in the pork barrel scam, and therefore disqualified from the state witness program.
Litigator Raymond Fortun, in an independent legal opinion, echoed the same concerns.
In his opinion posted online, Fortun wrote:
"(Napoles) says she feared for her life. I'd rather believe that she was enticed by the promise that she could become a state witness instead in order to avoid imprisonment.
(But) Janet Napoles CANNOT become a state witness because SHE IS THE MOST GUILTY. She is most guilty because she had the most to gain from the pork barrel scandal."