A key former aide of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said the leader manipulated last year's election results and should resign.
Victoria Garchitorena, who advised Mrs Arroyo on poverty alleviation and governance, likened her former boss to 'a graduate student who will pass but who wants to [with honours] and so cheats in her exams. Any self-respecting educational institution will kick her out.'
Mrs Garchitorena believes President Arroyo won by a small margin over actor Fernando Poe Jnr in the May elections last year, but altered the numbers to increase her lead.
'For me, to manipulate the election results to increase her lead is still wrong, it is still cheating,' she said in an exclusive interview.
Most of the president's cabinet has resigned following the emergence in June of a wiretapped telephone conversation which the opposition says is evidence Mrs Arroyo asked a former election official to alter the vote tally.
Mrs Garchitorena, 61, is the first of those ministers to cite those conversations as why she quit on July 10.
'I told her how I felt about the tapes,' she said. How Mrs Arroyo reacted to her written resignation, she does not know. 'She never contacted me.' Listening to the tape and reading the transcript of the conversations 'really affected me', she said.
