Nobel laureate Maria Ressa has been acquitted in the last of five tax evasion cases filed against her in the Philippines. "You got to have faith," the beaming journalist told reporters gathered outside a Manila court, BBC reported.
The five tax-related cases against the veteran journalist and her news site Rappler were filed during the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte. “This is really a win not just for Maria … but a win for the Philippines,” Ressa’s lawyer Francis Lim told BBC.
The Rappler had been critical of Duterte's bloody war on drugs. Ressa, a former CNN journalist is the CEO and co-founder of Rappler. The website, in a statement, said that the win is for everyone who has kept the faith that a free and responsible press empowers communities and strengthens democracy.
In January this year, Ressa was cleared of four earlier counts of tax violations filed in 2018 by Duterte’s government. Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression in the Philippines.
Currently, 59-year-old Ressa is on bail and is appealing a six-year prison sentence that was handed down in 2020 for a separate cyber libel conviction. If convicted, Ressa for the tax evasion charges, she would have been imprisoned for 34 years.
Former Philippines president Duterte faces an investigation by the International Criminal Court over thousands of deaths linked to his anti-narcotics campaign. The tax evasion cases stemmed from a sale of Philippine depositary receipts in 2015, a way for companies to raise money from foreign investors.