When it rains, it pours.
After the recent disclosure of anomalous transactions at the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) under the previous administration, now there are more revelations of irregularities at the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.
The proceeds of the operations of both the PCSO and Pagcor are supposed to be used for social amelioration and charity projects. But as it is turning out, these two government entities have been spending public money like a drunken sailor.
In the case of the PCSO, what has come to light in the recent hearings of the Senate blue-ribbon committee is shocking.
For starters, the lotto operator had spent a total of P325 million from 2008 to 2010 in intelligence funds. The breakdown of the amount: P75 million in 2008, P90 million in 2009 and P160 million in 2010.
The PCSO intelligence fund for 2010 of P160 million, it bears noting, is much bigger than the intelligence fund of the entire Armed Forces of the Philippines for that same year.
Former PCSO General Manager Rosario Uriarte admitted that she personally delivered some of the project proposals and budget requests to former President Gloria Arroyo. Uriarte also confirmed that Arroyo had signed the documents personally in her presence.
The “intelligence funds” were supposed to be used to gather information to curb jueteng, the illegal numbers game that had been hampering the implementation of the Small Town Lottery (STL) of the PCSO, to check “unauthorized expenditures of endowment fund for charity patients and organizations,” and lead to the arrest of fixers and owners of drugstores selling medicines donated by the PCSO, and so on.
But Uriarte admitted that the intelligence funds had been partly used, among others, to pay “blood money” for the release of several overseas Filipino workers imprisoned in the Middle East.
Some P150 million was used, in fact, just several months before the last national elections, or the last few months of Arroyo’s expiring term, raising speculation that it could have been funneled to the administration party’s electoral bid.
But that was not the end of it. Later, there were revelations that the PCSO had also given seven bishops luxury vehicles apparently to get their support for the then-President who was facing an impeachment crisis over alleged corruption and vote fraud.
In the case of Pagcor, the current management headed by Cristino Naguiat Jr. the other day filed plunder charges against former Chairman Efraim Genuino, his son Erwin, daughter Sheryl and 38 other personalities before the Department of Justice for allegedly conspiring in siphoning off about P186 million in Pagcor funds from 2003 to 2010 to Batang Iwas Droga (Bida) Foundation, which subsequently ran in the 2010 elections as a party-list group. Among the evidence presented were several checks given to Bida to defray the cost of advertisements amounting to over P63 million to promote the party-list group from 2008 until the May 2010 elections.
This is already the third plunder complaint filed against Genuino. The first involved the illegal disbursement of about P26.7 million for the production of the 2008 movie Baler, while the second was about the anomalous release of funding assistance worth P34 million to the Philippine Amateur Swimming Association Inc. beginning 2007.
It’s only now that more and more reports of corruption under the previous administration have begun to surface. There’s probably going to be more in the months ahead as the one-year-old Aquino administration goes through documents with a fine-tooth comb and unearths glaring anomalies. The cynics will probably see this as no more than political vendetta. But plunder of the treasury under any administration should be punished, and punished severely. The rule of law must be upheld at all times.
