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senators said Sunday Malacañang’s refusal to order the
release of the list of borrowers alleged to have
benefited from the Quedancor swine- development project,
on the ground such will violate bank secrecy laws,
smacks of a cover-up.
In separate text messages sent to the
BusinessMirror over the weekend, Senate Minority Leader
Aquilino Pimentel Jr. and Sen. Francis Escudero wanted
to know how bank secrecy can be involved when the funds
borrowed from Quedancor belong to taxpayers.
“It is not covered by secrecy of bank
deposits law. It [Quedancor] is not even authorized to
keep deposits. Besides, it is public money,” Escudero
said.
According to Pimentel, the Arroyo
administration’s obsession with secrecy is a bane for a
democratic government. “It is a throwback to the Middle
Ages where kings and queens were deemed successors of
God.”
Pimentel pointed out that Quedancor is a
government-owned corporation and as such, “its
transactions using public funds cannot be shrouded in
the so-called bank secrecy law.”
The senators were reacting to published
reports at the weekend quoting Palace counsel Sergio
Apostol as warning that Quedancor officials might run
afoul of the bank secrecy law by releasing the names and
loan details of the parties who borrowed billions from
the Quedancor when it put up a special fund in 2004 to
support the swine-development program.
The Commission on Audit (COA), in its
2005 report, had noted anomalies in the
multibillion-peso program, funded by loans from the Land
Bank of the Philippines and Equitable PCI. Nearly P800
million in undocumented receivables were among the
highlights of the report.
A University of the Philippines
professor, waving the report before the press last week,
had theorized that funds may have been diverted, through
ghost beneficiaries, to a campaign war chest for the
2004 election.
Insisting that the public has the right
to know who got the (Quedancor) money, Pimentel on
Sunday voiced growing public suspicion that “another
Palace cover-up is in the offing.”
Senators earlier aired concern that a
similar scheme was in the works when Malacañang also
refused to release the minutes of a Neda-Investment
Council meeting in which the government decided to drop
its initial preference for a build-operate-transfer
option in favor of an offer from Zhong Xing
Telecommunications Equipment Co. Ltd. (ZTE) to build a
$329-million national broadband network (NBN) bankrolled
by a China loan.
President Arroyo later scrapped the
ZTE-NBN deal amid a major bribery scandal hounding her
administration. The anomaly is still being investigated
by three Senate committees even after conducting nearly
a dozen marathon public hearings. |
