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<img loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-9/florin-hilbay-sm.webp" alt="Florin Hilbay" />
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(Florin Hilbay)
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That cultivated image was not enough to mislead the public into voting Hilbay senator in the May 2019 elections. He was one of the eight candidates of the Liberal Party-supported Otso Diretso ticket. With Senator Francis Pangilinan as their campaign manager, all eight of them lost miserably.
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Hilbay was the Solicitor General of President Benigno Aquino III. As solicitor general, Hilbay defended all the official acts of his now-disgraced master.
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Even after he was no longer solicitor general, Hilbay still defended Aquino over the latter's role in the infamous 2015 Mamasapano Massacre, where 44 elite police officers were allowed to be killed like sitting ducks in a skirmish with Moro separatist rebels in Maguindanao.
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Having identified himself with the political opposition to President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, Hilbay expectedly made nasty remarks against the President last July, after the House of Representatives Committee on Legislative Franchises voted to deny the ABS-CBN broadcasting empire a new legislative franchise to replace its last one which expired on 4 May 2020.
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Hilbay posted on social media:
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"When this dictatorship is over, let us commit to giving ABS-CBN - its leaders and employees - the franchise it (sic) deserves."
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As a lawyer, and a first place Bar topnotcher at that, and one who is supposed to be an expert in Constitutional Law, Hilbay is aware that his reference to the Duterte administration as a <i>"dictatorship"</i> is groundless.
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How can Hilbay call the Duterte government a dictatorship when the Supreme Court is functioning; when almost every government policy is challenged in the Supreme Court; when the political opposition has seats in the Senate and the House; and when Hilbay himself can speak up against the government, as he did, and get away with it?
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Just because Hilbay and his fellow candidates in the Otso Diretso ticket were repudiated by the people in the May 2019 elections (where he landed in 29th place) and President Duterte's candidates did very well in the same polls does not mean that the current government is a dictatorship.
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As a supposed expert on the Constitution, Hilbay knows that Congress acted within its power not to grant a new franchise to ABS-CBN, especially after ABS-CBN tried to continue operations even after its franchise had already expired, and after it was discovered by the National Telecommunications Commission that ABS-CBN was using the franchise of another TV station in violation of the law.
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Why then, does Hilbay emphatically say that ABS-CBN deserves a new franchise? Is it because of his reported past friendship with the 54-year old ABS-CBN talent Agot Isidro, a known critic of the current administration?
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Hilbay has a lot of explaining to do about his millions in allowances when he was SolGen