Palace stands by Pagcor coffee raps

MANILA, Philippines - Malacañang maintained yesterday that the amount spent for coffee during the time of the previous management of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) was too much and must be investigated.

“The budget this year for coffee is only P30 million. How are we able to do it with P30 million when they were doing it at P167 million. So obviously there’s something wrong, there was an obvious abuse of the consumption of coffee there. We disagree that it was poor math. We believe that there was widespread corruption in the consumption of coffee,” presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda said.

“They’re drunk with coffee there so our position is we believe in the revelations made by (Pagcor) chairman (Cristino) Bong Naguiat and I think that should be properly investigated,” he said in a press briefing in Malacañang.

Lacierda added it would be up to Naguiat to find out the other anomalies at Pagcor.

“We will just wait for the revelations made by Pagcor,” he said.

Lacierda said the current Pagcor officials would just have “to go through the evidence” and documents before coming out with other exposes.

“There were mountains of evidence there that they had to look into. And that’s the reason why you’ve seen a lot of revelations coming out from Pagcor. And if ever there are further revelations, chairman Bong Naguiat will reveal them in due time,” Lacierda said.

In his State of the Nation Address, President Aquino said P1 billion was allocated for coffee alone by the previous management of Pagcor.

The P1-billion coffee expenditures covered the period of August 2001 to June of 2010 for 12 branches.

Lacierda said earlier that for August 2001 the amount was P933, 664.57; for 2002, P22,204,609.23; for 2003, P29,804,628.60; for 2004, P83,714,154.02; for 2005, P172,819,600.96; for 2006, P167,379,603.74; for 2007, P119,670,645.01; for 2008, P164,561,181.88; for 2009, P162,917,571.58; for January to June 2010, the amount was P83,403,251.29 for a total of P1,007,408,908.86.