LAWMAKERS yesterday said Vice President Sara Duterte should also face the House’s investigation into her alleged misuse of public funds if she was able to attend the hearing of the quad committee on Wednesday night to support her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, who attended it for the first time.
“Instead of showing up at the quad committee hearing para mag-miron (just to be a spectator), VP Duterte should instead attend the (Committee on) Good Government and Public Accountability hearings and truthfully answer how she spent the confidential funds of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and DepEd (Department of Education),” said Rep. France Castro (PL, ACT), a member of the militant Makabayan bloc.
The younger Duterte personally received the invitation from the good government panel chaired by Manila Rep. Joel Chua while she was sitting as a guest of the quad committee, which is looking into extrajudicial killings under her father’s war on drugs.
The Chua committee requested her attendance at a congressional hearing on November 20 to address issues regarding her office’s questionable utilization of hundreds of millions in confidential funds.
Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro said it was baffling why Duterte has not been participating in the good government committee hearings, but took time to attend the quad comm hearing, where she was not an invited resource person.
“Puwede naman pala, kaya naman pala niyang dumating at mag-stay until midnight. Sana itong kaniyang presence sa pagsuporta sa ating former president sa quad comm, sana naipapakita rin niya kung saan siya talaga invited na resource speaker sa Committee on Good Government (So she can attend, she can come and stay until midnight. This show of support for the former president and the quad comm, we’re hoping that she can do the same by showing up before the Committee on Good Government where she is officially an invited resource person),” Luistro told TeleRadyo in an interview,
Last Monday, the Chua panel cited in contempt four OVP officials who have repeatedly snubbed its hearing even after being subpoenaed.
The committee however, spared Duterte’s chief of staff Zuleika Lopez, who is in the United States, after she explained in a letter that she had to accompany her ailing aunt while in intensive medical care.
The four who were cited in contempt and ordered arrested were OVP assistant chief of staff and Bids and Awards Committee chair Lemuel Ortonio, special disbursing Officer (SDO) Gina Acosta, and former Department of Education (DepEd) Assistant Secretary Sunshine Charry Fajarda and SDO Edward Fajarda, who transferred to the OVP after Duterte resigned as education secretary last July.
The Vice President has said three of the four OVP officials who were cited in contempt failed to attend the hearings because of the activities related to the OVP’s 89th anniversary today.
OVP administrative and financial services Director Rosalynne Sanchez, chief accountant Julieta Villadelrey and budget division chief administrative officer Kelvin Gerome Teñido attended the panel’s last hearing to explain the adverse audit findings of the Commission on Audit in the use of the confidential funds of the OVP and DepEd, particularly the P73 million that it has disallowed and has asked the Vice President and two other officials to return to the government.
The P73 million was part of the OVP’s P125 million confidential funds in 2022 which the OVP spent in just 11 days.
The COA has also issued Audit Observation Memorandums (AOM) for the P375 million spent in the first three quarters of 2023 because of alleged irregularities.
The Chua committee is also looking into the P112.5 million in confidential funds allocated in 2023 to DepEd when Duterte was still heading the department.
The three OVP officials who attended the hearing told lawmakers they have no personal knowledge of how the P500 million in confidential funds were spent by the OVP.
