IT'S too bad that President Estrada dismissed Sen. Jovito Salonga as getting senile after the latter questioned the escrow agreements between the Presidential Commission on Good Government and the Philippine National Bank. Obviously the President doesn't know what he's talking about. (What are his advisers doing?)

Far from being senile, the 78-year-old bar topnotcher remains in tiptop mental shape, and in fact, he has taken it upon himself to be a one-man wrecking crew against any compromise agreement with the Marcoses. It's an effort from which he stands to gain nothing materially at this point, so that one has to believe he's doing it for la patria. He doesn't deserve to be insulted by the President for trying to safeguard the people's money.

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Mr. Estrada obviously thought Salonga was accusing him of having put up foundations to siphon off Marcos's hidden wealth. Actually Salonga was referring to the Marcos-controlled foundations abroad that became the conduit for the dictator's hidden wealth. These Marcos foundations invested the money in various enterprises abroad, the earnings from which are still being drawn by the Marcoses. Salonga pointed out that what is being held in escrow by the PNB is not the $580 million deposited in Swiss banks, but merely the records of these foundations. He also said the agreements are defective because they were entered into by the PCGG and the PNB only and lacks the signature of Swiss authorities. Thus the amounts stated in those documents are "illusory and merely anticipatory," he said.

But Salonga is not alone in worrying about these escrow agreements. In September 1998, the Sandiganbayan's First Division chaired by Presiding Justice Francis Garchitorena examined the PNB escrow documents and came to virtually the same conclusion. The Sandiganbayan pointed out that the amounts in escrow belonging to the 12 foundations are not stated anywhere in the agreements and neither is the total.

Moreover, it observed that the agreements "are not with any Swiss entity or authority in control of said funds or even with the foundations themselves," but only between the PNB and the PCGG, and that while they were signed in August 1995, the dates when the amounts from the foundations "were actually received by, or deposited with the PNB are not shown." The court also noted that some of these foundations are those "whose funds are subject matter of the complaint" (meaning, Marcos-controlled) and that they ought to be under the disposition of the graft court alone.

Obviously, there's more to these escrow agreements than Mr. Estrada's pique with Salonga. Sen. Raul Roco is on the right track when he said that the Senate should investigate them.