Let them pay

EDITORIAL CARTOON

By themselves, the numbers are both staggering and mind-boggling. According to Ms Rosario Uriarte, former Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office general manager, the PCSO spent P325 million in a hush-hush intelligence fund from 2008 to 2010. The PCSO, long considered the most generous of the Philippine government’s charitable extensions, finds itself in the center of an expanding probe centering on ridiculous amounts of money spent on unknown, or possibly non-existent, projects.

As she was being grilled by the Senate blue ribbon committee, Uriarte admitted that she personally brought several memoranda to then President Gloria Arroyo, requesting for more money for PCSO’s intelligence operations; and that Ms Arroyo initialed her approval on the memos. Uriarte’s testimony may have placed the former president, now a congresswoman, at the top of a crooked pyramid.

Blue ribbon committee chair Sen. Teofisto Guingona III opined that Ms Arroyo could be charged with the crime of plunder: “It implicates the former president in this whole mystery. It makes her a co-conspirator…. When you steal more than P50 million, it’s plunder.” Malacañang immediately signified that it would not hesitate to prosecute the former president if the Senate probe unearths enough strong evidence against her.

Observers can hardly be faulted for starting to become used to the slinging of such astonishing amounts of money by a government agency that has become synonymous with giving. But the numbers will not go away easily.

Uriarte admitted that P138 million, the single biggest spot of spending, was used during the election year of 2010—specifically between January and June. An incredulous Sen. Panfilo Lacson, former director general of the Philippine National Police, noted that the expenditure was bigger than the money set aside by the entire Armed Forces of the Philippines for its own intelligence fund this year, P124.3 million.

What could the PCSO be gathering intelligence for with such a huge amount of money? In the series of memoranda-requests to President Arroyo for additional intelligence funds, the reason given was the same: to combat fraudulent practices such as selling donated medicines, unofficial use of the ubiquitous PCSO ambulances and the nefarious activities of fixers, among others.

Her office only had P60 million for intelligence operations for 2010, but Uriarte admitted that she wrote President Arroyo asking first for additional P150 million, and then another P10 million. A perturbed Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile blurted out: “If you already have P60 million, why did you still ask for big sums of money? What event were you preparing for? An insurgency? A rebellion within the PCSO?” Uriarte said that the P150 million was meant for the effective implementation of the planned Small Town Lotto or STL, while her fellow PCSO officials feigned ignorance about the money. She also claimed, after further grilling, that part of the intelligence funds was spent as blood money to pay families of victims killed by OFWs in Saudi Arabia as well as to finance relief operations for victims of calamities.

It does not surprise that the Senate probe is now being criticized for being political in nature, as an attempt of the current one-year-old administration to defame its predecessor.

A former PCSO chair, Manuel Morato, accused the incumbent PCSO chair Margarita Juico, who served for a time in the Arroyo administration as PCSO director, of “lying through her teeth” when she said that the past administration left the PCSO with debts of P4 billion, yet one more in a series of increasingly unbelievable numbers. Now the Ombudsman has started its own probe of the escalating PCSO mess.

But the question remains: where is the money? Was it spent on “ghost” projects, or did it line some official’s deep pockets? Perhaps the worst thing about this quagmire of rising numbers is the fact that the funds could easily have been spent on much more important things. How many hungry Filipinos can P150 million feed? How many school buildings could it have built? How many lives could it have saved?

Now that the right people are looking into what could be the worst re-channeling of state funds in recent history, they need to make sure that the money is traced, that they identify those to whom the money was diverted—and that they pay.