FOR a defense to work at all, it must at least be worthy of belief.
In the case of former Guagua, Pampanga mayor Ricardo Rivera who was convicted of graft and sentenced to six years imprisonment on June 8, 2022, the Sandiganbayan said blaming the uncooperative weather for a delay of more than nine years simply defies credibility.
“To emphasize, the project should have been completed on or before 20 December 2009. However, what take 240 days to construct was fully finished only after 10 years. This fact alone speaks volumes as to the gross negligence of the accused,” the anti-graft court’s Fourth Division said.
In the assailed decision, the defendant former mayor was found guilty of causing undue injury to the municipal government and giving unwarranted advantage to the private contractor who took more than 10 years to complete a slaughterhouse that was supposed to take only eight months to build.
Based on the information filed by the Office of the Ombudsman on July 24, 2013, the municipal government awarded the P28.96 million contract for the Guagua Municipal Slaughterhouse to NC’s General Contractor on April 13, 2009.
The bulk of the budget for the project was funded by a P25.8 million loan obtained by the local government from the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP).
When the municipality started paying P182,290.90 monthly for the loan in August 2014, the project was already two years past its supposed completion date.
It was only in August 2019 that the slaughterhouse started full operations – almost 10 years beyond the deadline.
In his defense, Rivera assigned the blame on the weather, citing typhoons and torrential rains that supposedly caused extensive flooding in the work site.
After his conviction, the accused asked the court to take a second look into his defense, saying the evidence should have been enough to earn him an acquittal.
The court, however, pointed out that the documents offered by the defense were weather updates, situational reports, emergency work reports, and photographs that were supposed to show flooding in the work site.
These turned out to be unofficial and unsigned disaster reports from the Municipal Planning and Development Coordinator Office, which Rivera tried to authenticate by offering the testimony of a secretary of the Sangguniang Bayan who had nothing to do with the records.
Authenticated or not, the court pointed out that the papers do not explain why it took almost a decade for an eight-month project to be finished.
“Nowhere in the records does it show that the torrential rains were non-stop during the entire year making the continuation of the project impossible,” the Sandiganbayan added.
