Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III is being shrewd these days.

When he ran for president, one of the first things he did was promise that Hacienda Luisita, a huge sugar plantation that he and his family own, would be distributed to the farmers and farm workers under the government’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. In five years, he once said, the agrarian dispute would be resolved.

He made the same promise again during his first briefing with reporters at the presidential palace in his first week on the job as president. He said the row at the sugar plantation, which resulted in a strike in 2004 and a subsequent massacre in which 14 people were killed and scores injured, would be settled in “substantially less than five years”.

Then last week, Hacienda Luisita Inc. announced that it had reached a “compromise agreement” with the farm workers. This agreement, the management said, gave the farm workers the choice of either owning shares of stocks of Hacienda Luisit or parcels of land. The agreement is based on the stock distribution option (SDO), a scheme that is allowed by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in lieu of actual land distribution.

The compromise agreement is fine if 1) it were truly the choice of the farm workers, free from duress and other forms of intimidation and pressure, or they were not forced into it by conditions created by the hacienda owners,  and 2) it were not disclosed a few weeks before the Supreme Court would rule on the legality of the SDO, the agreement’s raison d’être.

I will discuss at length the first point in the continuation of this post in the coming days. At the moment, let me just focus on the compromise agreement and why his uncles and cousins who run Hacienda Luisita suddenly foisted it to the public.

The agreement was obviously what Aquino was referring to when he said during his first press briefing at the palace the settlement of the land dispute “will even be substantially less than five years. Can I just say that I have been getting very good reports?”

This was also what his uncle, Fernando Cojuangco, the chief operating officer of the company that runs the hacienda, was apparently referring to when he told The New York Times in March, in response to a question on whether the family would give up the land: “No, we’re not going to. I think it would be irresponsible because I feel that continuing what we have here is the way to go. Sugar farming has to be; it’s the kind of business that has to be done plantation-style.”

According to HLI, more than 70 percent of the farm workers approved the compromise agreement this week by choosing shares of stocks instead of land. This means the status quo in the hacienda – the Cojuangco-Aquinos run the place, the farmer and supposedly co-owners toil, depending on whether there’s jobs available – will remain, if this agreement pushes through. The Cojuangco-Aquinos would then have their wish.

What this compromise agreement does, most importantly, is preempt the Supreme Court and attempt to influence its future decision on the SDO.

A backgrounder: The SDO was inserted by the government of President Cory Aquino, Aquino’s mother, in the CARP. It had been denounced by activists and law experts as illegal and immoral. But no matter, they rammed the SDO through. In 1989, HLI implemented the SDO but only after it evaded — thanks to the first People Power that installed Cory — an earlier court ruling ordering the Cojuangco-Aquinos to distribute the land. In 2005, after getting complaints from farmers, the Department of Agrarian Reform investigated the SDO implementation in Hacienda Luisita and found that it only made the lives of the farm workers more miserable. It recommended to the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC) the revocation of the SDO and the actual distribution of land to the farm workers, which the council so ordered. The Cojuangco-Aquinos responded by filing for a temporary restraining order against the PARC ruling before the Supreme Court, which obliged that same year. (This is probably one of the longest temporary restraining orders in the country).

On August 18, the court is set to hear oral arguments on the validity of the PARC ruling and the SDO. If the court orders to revoke the SDO, that would probably be the end of Hacienda Luisita as we know it. The crown jewel of the Cojuangco-Aquino clan will disintegrate, and damn if Aquino and his cousins and uncles will allow that.

President Aquino has insisted that he only has a negligible number of shares in HLI and that he has not been helping administer the estate. He’s now saying that he leaves it to the Supreme Court to settle this matter. And HLI had announced that it would bring the compromise agreement to the Supreme Court by August 18, in effect saying that the court does not have to lose sweat over the case, just approve the agreement and keep everybody happy.

It would be naïve to think that President Aquino does not have a hand, direct or otherwise, in all this. It’s like saying he is president for nothing of a country where people defer to even the lowliest village chieftain, of a country where political dynasties become political dynasties so they can protect their land and business and political interests. At the very least, he’s helped grease the rails for the HLI, as what I think happened when his spokesman announced that the president no longer questions the appointment of Renato Corona as the chief justice of the Supreme Court. A known ally of Aquino’s predecessor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Aquino was apoplectic when she appointed Corona as chief justice. Aquino even made a big fuss over not taking his oath of office before Corona, threatening instead to do it before a village chieftain. (Corona must have been insulted but did not show it).

But now that Aquino and his family’s hacienda’s future lies in the hands of the court that Corona leads (the case, by the way, will be decided by the court en banc), Aquino suddenly becomes nice to him.

Anyway, based on the HLI managemenet’s actions alone, it is now clear it cooked up the compromise agreement to force the Supreme Court to act on its wish to have the anti-SDO petition junked. And Aquino knew about it from day one, and even encouraged it. The brazenness of this is breathtaking. This may be all right legally. But morally, ethically? And what does that say about a president who ran on the promise of change, of moral and ethical conduct in office, of treading the straight path, of never using power to enrich himself and his family?

Next: How President Aquino’s family wangled the compromise agreement.