PEACE bond scam redux

The Commission on Audit (COA) dropped a bombshell this week in asking Presidential Peace Adviser Teresita Deles to account for P1.14 billion of funds allocated to her office. The teeth-gnashing aspect of this scandal is that a mere adviser to the President is once again shown with her fingers on billions of pesos of hard-earned taxpayers’ money.

But what else is new? Deles, together with Social Welfare and Development Secretary Dinky Soliman made Filipinos poorer by P35 billion during the failed presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Getting caught with their hands inside the cookie jar seems par for the course for the duo.

In fact, it would not come as a surprise if Deles and Soliman should find themselves in the company of pork barrel queen Janet Lim Napoles in Muntinlupa after PNoy’s presidency. This because they have already escaped prosecution for far too long over the CODE-NGO/PEACE bond scam when they abandoned Arroyo’s sinking ship and joined P-Noy’s march to Malacañang in 2010.

Napoles’ siphoning of congressional pork barrel through fake NGOs was a mere variation of the much bigger CODE-NGO/PEACE bond scam. What Deles and Soliman and their lackeys at CODE-NGOs did was far more ignominious.

In a nutshell, Deles and Soliman used their ties with Arroyo so their CODE-NGO was able to float zero-rated treasury bonds worth P10 billion, which they then sold to the secondary market for a whopping margin of P1.8 billion. Since CODE-NGO was outside of COA’s scrutiny as part of civil society, CODE-NGO’s self-serving claim that it spent the P1.8 billion for poverty alleviation could never be determined.

What’s worse with the PEACE bond scam than Napoles’ pork barrel scheme was that when the bonds matured after 10 years, it was us the taxpayers who had to pay the bonds’ face value and interest earnings totaling P35 billion. Ouch. Iginisa tayo nina Deles at Soliman sa sarili nating mantika na ang puhunan lang nila ay laway. It’s payback time for us the people against these two. -end-