Ripe for decision

The good news is that the Ombudsman has finally indicted before the Sandiganbayan the initial batch of three Senators and six others including the alleged mastermind, for the misuse of the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF). The three Senators, Enrile, Estrada and Revilla have been accused of “conspiring” with their staff officers and Napoles and her hirelings, of “willfully, unlawfully and criminally amassing, accumulating and/or acquiring ill-gotten wealth through a combination of overt criminal acts.” The Ombudsman claimed that the three Senators and their staff have “repeatedly received kickbacks or commissions before, during and after project identification.”

The bad news is that the Ombudsman has not charged many other members of Congress both in the Senate and House of Representatives and their staff who have similarly engaged in the same unlawful and criminal acts based on the records already in its possession. In fact these records have been publicized earlier and there is no reason for the Ombudsman not to be aware of them or not to have copies thereof. In said records, there are actually twenty Senators and one hundred members of the House of Representatives also named as involved in the scam. To be sure the present charge only covers P581.181 million whereas the entire amount illegally amassed is supposedly P10 billion and the transactions are from 2003 to 2010 only. The Ombudsman should thus lose no time in filing the additional charges covering transactions under the present administration.

The on-going developments are undoubtedly encouraging signs that finally some “big fishes” will already be caught and correspondingly punished. Hopefully, the billions they have illegally amassed will also be recovered. These developments also show us the massive corruption occurring in our government, past and present, using such lump sum discretionary fund like the PDAF until it was finally declared by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional last November 10, 2013. If the Ombudsman digs into the Commission on Audit records of transactions from 2010, a bigger amount of corrupt deals will be unearthed because the PDAF even grew almost threefold under the present regime.

In fact the present administration also concocted an even bigger lump sum discretionary fund and called it Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) where so far a total of P150 billion have been used all upon the authority and with the signature of the President himself. These funds were supposedly “savings” of the various departments in the Executive branch. But as later discovered not all of them are savings. A large amount consists of the unspent portions of the budget in the various departments transferred and utilized for other purposes in other departments. There has been an accusation un-denied up to now that a portion of the DAP has also been allotted to the 20 Senators who voted for the impeachment of former SC Chief Justice Corona.

The general rule is that all public funds in the Public Treasury can be taken out and disbursed in a manner specified by the General Appropriations Act or special law enacted for specific purpose/s therein provided. Following this rule, it is clear that lump sum funds disbursed at the discretion of any government official including the President is prohibited. This is to ensure that public money will be spent only for a specific public purpose as provided by law. And this is precisely the reason why the PDAF was declared unconstitutional by the SC.

And this is also the same principle invoked in questioning the constitutionality of the DAP before the Supreme Court. While the DAP is supposed to provide economic stimulus, too many items therein appear so similar to the President’s use of the PDAF. In fact the Commission on Audit (COA) has already been asked to report on some questionable projects using the DAP totaling about P60 billion.

Up to now however, COA has not reported about them, specifically the following: (1) P5.432 billion compensation balance paid to the Hacienda Luisita owners who are relatives of the President; (2) P1.819 billion disbursed to the Office of the Presidential Adviser on Peace Process; (3) P5.5 billion for various infrastructure projects (4) P6.5 billion support fund under the DILG; (5) P8.592 billion for the ARMM transition and support plan; (6) P250 million Performance Challenge Fund; (7) P6.5 million augmenting the existing PDAF; (8) P2 billion national road projects for Tarlac (9) P1.8 billion for Tulay ng Pangako sa Kaunlaran Program; (10) P5 billion Tourism road infrastructure project; (11) P8.295 billion nationwide priority local projects; and (12) P1.6 billion for capability requirements of the Philippine Coast Guard in the West Philippine Sea.

The SC should therefore already resolve the petitions questioning the DAP’s constitutionality. It has long been submitted for decision. The issues are really not so controversial and difficult to resolve. The Constitution is quite clear on this matter. Specifically it provides that:

Section 25 (2) Article VI. “No provision or enactment shall be embraced in the General Appropriations Bill unless it relates specifically to some particular appropriation therein. Any such provision or enactment shall be limited in its operation to the appropriation to which it relates”. x x x x x.

(5) No law shall be passed authorizing any transfer of appropriations; however the President, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the Heads of the Constitutional Commissions may, by law, be authorized to augment any item in the General Appropriations Law for their respective offices from savings in other items of their respective appropriations.”

The above cited provisions are clear enough. In fact the Office of the President has even informed the SC that it has already stopped using the DAP. Obviously this is an attempt to render the case moot and academic. The SC however should still rule on the merits for the sake of public interest.

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