THE House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability has asked the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) to verify the civil registry records of 1,992 individuals who supposedly received payments from the P500 million confidential funds of the Office of the Vice President (OVP).
The panel chaired by Manila Rep. Joel Chua wrote the PSA last Monday after the agency reported to the committee that 405 out of the 677 names listed as beneficiaries of the Department of Education’s (DepEd) confidential funds during Vice President Sara Duterte’s term as education secretary have no birth records.
“May we request for the verification of the Civil Registry Documents (birth, marriage, and death) of the names in the attached list relative to the investigation being conducted by the Committee,” Manila Rep. Joel Chua said in his letter to National Statistician and Civil Registrar General Claire Dennis Mapa.
The names under scrutiny appear were the ones found on acknowledgment receipts (ARs) submitted by the OVP to the Commission on Audit (COA) as liquidation documents to justify the hundreds of millions of disbursements made between late 2022 and the third quarter of 2023.
COA has disallowed P73.28 million of the P125 million confidential funds disbursed by the OVP in 2022 and ordered Vice President Sara Duterte to return the funds, which was spent in just 11 days, to the public coffers.
The audit body has likewise issued Audit Observation Memorandums (AOMs) against the P375 million in confidential funds disbursed by the OVP in 2023 after finding irregularities in the use of the funds.
During the committee hearings, it was revealed that the OVP spent P16 million to rent 34 safe houses for just 11 days in late 2022, with one safe house costing nearly P91,000 per day.
The OVP was likewise found to have allocated P15 million for youth leadership summits supposedly conducted with the Philippine Army. Military officials have denied receiving such funds, saying the summits were funded by the military and local government units.
Lawmakers have aired suspicions of misrepresentation and fabrication of activities to justify the confidential funds utilization.
Chua said a PSA certification “that these names are not in the PSA database would bolster suspicions that they do not exist and that the ARs were fabricated to justify confidential fund expenditures by the OVP and DepEd under Vice President Duterte.”
Among the fabricated identities that the Chua panel earlier found to have signed the ARs were “Mary Jane Piattos” and “Kokoy Villamin,” whose name appeared in both the DepEd and OVP receipts for confidential funds although with different signatures.
The PSA has certified that both Piattos and Villamin have no birth, marriage or death records, prompting lawmakers to conclude that their identities were faked.
The good government panel on Monday wrapped up its hearing on the use of confidential funds by the DepEd and the OVP, but it will resume next year to continue looking into other questionable disbursements, such as the DepEd’s procurement of laptops.
The fund misuse issue has been used by a group led by Akbayan party-list and another one led by the militant Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) to file two separate impeachment complaints against the Vice President.
POCKETED
La Union Rep. Paolo Ortega said the Vice President allocated the confidential funds even to recipients with questionable identities and appears to have “pocketed” a portion of it.
“Dalawang Pasko ang lumipas na nilustay niya ang pera ng bayan. Para siyang Santa Claus ng OVP at DepEd na namimigay ng pera na pinaghirapan ng taongbayan (Two Christmases have passed and they have been squandering people’s money. She’s playing Sta. Claus at the OVP and DepEd, giving away money that the people have worked for,” Ortega told the Chua panel last Monday.
Ortega said that by “pocketing” people’s money, the Vice President allegedly committed a “crime of the highest order,” which he said is “not only a culpable violation of the Constitution but a betrayal of the trust of the people that had been given to her.”
“Pero hindi lang pinapamigay, mukhang binubulsa pa. In short, yumayaman si VP Sara at ang kaniyang mga kasamahan, habang marami pa ang kumakapit pa rin sa patalim (But it wasn’t only given away, it also appears to have been pocketed. In short, VP Sara and her associates profited wile many people remain mired in poverty),” he added.
While the committee did not recommend Duterte’s impeachment, Chua and panel members noted that their initial findings were cited in the two impeachment complaints against her.
