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-

Probe Sevilla’s Resignation

Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III  is on the right track in calling for a Senate investigation on  the sudden resignation of John Philip Sevilla as Customs Commissioner.

That is if Sevilla himself will not disclose in detail what prompted him to throw in the towel after just a year in an agency  generally conceded to be one of the most corrupt in the Philippine bureaucracy.

Sevilla cited "political pressure" as the main reason for his resignation. However, the United Nationalist Opposition claimed that Sevilla's resignation was prompted by the demand by the ruling party to come up with P3 billion supposedly as war chest for the 2016 polls.

In other words, that the BOC was to be used as a milking cow to generate campaign funds. Not surprisingly, the Palace has denied that  any such order exists.

Sevilla later said in a TV interview that he resigned because Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima himself, along with three others, asked him to resign. Earlier, Purisima was even all praises for Sevilla's excellent performance in the latter's brief stint at the BOC. 

If Sevilla's claim that it was Purisima himself who told him in no uncertain  terms to hand in his resignation despite his "stellar performance" in the BOC, then there's something very wrong with the circumstances under which he resigned.

Thus, the "milking cow" allegation is not farfetched at all.

Sen. Pimentel should therefore pursue his plan to initiate an investigation on Sevilla's resignation as this would reveal whether the Aquino administration is in fact not serious in pursuing the "daang matuwid" as its claims, but only wants to perpetuate the ruling party in power.

What's wrong with this is that the ruling party would be using for partisan politics the taxes and duties paid to the government that should really be used for vital social services and infrastructure development.

Sevilla's revelations are very serious and should be fully investigated in the Senate. The bombshell unleashed by Sevilla gives administration critics yet another reason to doubt PNoy's avowed commitment to the daang matuwid and intensify calls for his resignation even as the 2016 polls is just around the corner. -end-

Probe Sevilla’s Resignation

Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III  is on the right track in calling for a Senate investigation on  the sudden resignation of John Philip Sevilla as Customs Commissioner.

That is if Sevilla himself will not disclose in detail what prompted him to throw in the towel after just a year in an agency  generally conceded to be one of the most corrupt in the Philippine bureaucracy.

Sevilla cited "political pressure" as the main reason for his resignation. However, the United Nationalist Opposition claimed that Sevilla's resignation was prompted by the demand by the ruling party to come up with P3 billion supposedly as war chest for the 2016 polls.

In other words, that the BOC was to be used as a milking cow to generate campaign funds. Not surprisingly, the Palace has denied that  any such order exists.

Sevilla later said in a TV interview that he resigned because Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima himself, along with three others, asked him to resign. Earlier, Purisima was even all praises for Sevilla's excellent performance in the latter's brief stint at the BOC. 

If Sevilla's claim that it was Purisima himself who told him in no uncertain  terms to hand in his resignation despite his "stellar performance" in the BOC, then there's something very wrong with the circumstances under which he resigned.

Thus, the "milking cow" allegation is not farfetched at all.

Sen. Pimentel should therefore pursue his plan to initiate an investigation on Sevilla's resignation as this would reveal whether the Aquino administration is in fact not serious in pursuing the "daang matuwid" as its claims, but only wants to perpetuate the ruling party in power.

What's wrong with this is that the ruling party would be using for partisan politics the taxes and duties paid to the government that should really be used for vital social services and infrastructure development.

Sevilla's revelations are very serious and should be fully investigated in the Senate. The bombshell unleashed by Sevilla gives administration critics yet another reason to doubt PNoy's avowed commitment to the daang matuwid and intensify calls for his resignation even as the 2016 polls is just around the corner. -end-

Expansion then secession

US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton giving Philippine peace panel chair Miriam Coronel-Ferrer an award was a cheap photo-ops publicity stunt intended to court the votes of Filipino-Americans. To say that the award is vacuous and meaningless is a big understatement. 

Back here in the Philippines, our House of Representatives is set to decapitate eight provisions of the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) which are patently unconstitutional as to invite a declaration as such by the Supreme Court if the BBL is passed in its original form.

Not being a lawyer, Ferrer has proven to be a very bad choice to head the Philippine panel that forged last year a defective peace agreement with the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to the exclusion of all other parties in Mindanao.

As Yogi Berra used to say, “it’s déjà vu all over again” with the Philippine government, no thanks to Ferrer and Peace Process Adviser Teresita Deles, committing the same mistake it did when it forged a peace agreement during the Cory years with Nur Misuari’s MNLF to form the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, again to the exclusion of all the other stakeholders in Mindanao.

However, since Ferrer did not lack any legal advice from the battery of lawyers provided her, the glaring defects of the peace agreement and the proposed BBL can only be blamed on her stubbornness, her being afflicted with tunnel vision and maybe her dogged determination to win this peace award.

Clinton’s peace award, however, falls way, way short of the Nobel Peace Award which  coffee shop talk says the administration has been targeting in talking with the MILF, and why the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) allegedly refused to fire artillery to save the 44 massacred Special Action Forces.

Why are the eight provisions unconstitutional? Simple, because they would turn the proposed Bangsamoro government into a veritable sub-state, with full control of its armed units, as well as its own electoral, civil service and audit bodies.

Another provision would also allow untrammeled expansion of the  Bangsamoro territory, with only 10 percent of the voting population needed to force a plebiscite for a particular province to join the sub-state. And then what follows that expansion?

Secession?                                                                                                                        -END-