PCGG racks up $1-M travel expenses

MANILA, Philippines – Have funds, will travel.

Officials of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) have racked up almost $1 million on foreign travels for the first six months of this year alone.

Documents obtained by The STAR showed that the PCGG had charged about $958,751 in “traveling expenses” from their $34.14-million foreign litigation fund deposited with the Philippine National Bank from January to June 2008.

The expenditures, it was noted, had already exceeded the previous year’s full-year foreign travel expenses of PCGG officials.

The foreign travel expenses for the first half of the year also dwarfed the legal fees paid to foreign lawyers from the funds put up by the PCGG in January 2004 during the tenure of the late Haydee Yorac.

The funds were meant to pay the legal fees of foreign lawyers retained by the Philippine government to represent it in foreign ill-gotten wealth recovery cases.

The $958,751, it was learned, does not include the expenses of the official trip to Europe of PCGG chairman Camilo Sabio and his wife, PCGG commissioner Jaime Bautista and his wife, commissioner Ricardo Abcede, and other PCGG lawyers last September shortly before Sabio went on indefinite leave of absence.

Sources said that officials and lawyers of the PCGG and the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) had undertaken frequent foreign travels using the foreign litigation fund to “check” on the developments in the foreign recovery cases.

PCGG sources have questioned the huge foreign travel expenses and raised questions on the need for the PCGG and OSG executives to travel abroad just to check on the cases when one can get updates on the cases from the foreign lawyers via long distance phone calls.

“Chairman Yorac got her updates from the foreign lawyers via telephone. She never traveled abroad using the foreign litigation fund to check on the cases,” a source said.

“That’s why the fund had grown to $34.14 million and now it has even reached more than $59 million. The initial deposit had grown from the incurred interests,” the source said.