It’s not just the father who’s in hot water at the moment. The daughter is in deep trouble as well.
Slowly but surely, the House of Representatives has been unearthing enough evidence to show that the confidential funds Sara Duterte had asked for the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education she headed until September had apparently not gone to actual programs and projects but simply disappeared into thin air.
Of late, lawmakers have dug up fund recipients of such funds
bearing another set of obviously fictitious names, reinforcing well-founded fears that taxpayers’ money has been diverted elsewhere, most probably in private pockets.
How else should we treat the House discovery of fund receipts bearing such names they subsumed under the category “Team Grocery” as these alluded to food items.
For House Deputy Majority Leader Paolo Ortega V of La Union, the newly discovered names confirm suspicion that large sums of public money have been funnelled to fictitious individuals.
The questionable names, according to Ortega, have no official birth, marriage, or death records from the Philippine Statistics Authority. The OVP submitted these names to the Commission on Audit.
“The new names we found look like a shopping list for the market or grocery,” Rep. Ortega said. “If they are not real people, where did the funds go?” he asked.
That’s what taxpayers should also be asking Vice President Sara Duterte. The odd names on the list of recipients of the OVP and the Duterte-led Department of Education’s combined P612.5-million.
Not peanuts, or even chicken feed, that the OVP tried to foist on the public with fund receipts that bore obviously fake names.
The list keeps on growing, according to the lawmakers who have been sifting through 4500 receipts for confidential funds.
Rep. Ortega noted that out of 1,992 supposed recipients of the OVP’s CF, 1,322 had no birth records, 1,456 had no marriage records, and 1,593 had no death records.
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Manila Rep. Joel Chua, chair of the House committee on good government and public accountability, revealed earlier that 405 out of the 677 names listed as beneficiaries of DepEd’s CFs have no birth records, an indication that the names were clearly fabricated.
Perhaps it’s providential that the Senate has postponed Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial to July this year as this would give the House prosecution team enough time to gather more evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the OVP.
On the basis of just one part of the impeachment complaint alone, or the alleged misuse of confidential funds by the OVP, it would appear that Sara’s goose is cooked, so to speak, and she will have a lot of explaining to do before the Senate.
Of course, the Vice President is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and she has every opportunity to respond to the accusations levelled against her, but will the senators be convinced?
Let’s wait and see.