Ex-generals take charge of PCSO

MANILA, Philippines - Instead of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor), retired Marine general Alexander Balutan has been appointed general manager of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO).

The appointment dated Sept. 5 was signed by Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea. Jose Jorge Corpuz, a retired police chief superintendent, was appointed chairman of the charity agency.

Both officials were also named board members of the PCSO.

For now, the BuCor post went to retired police chief superintendent Rolando Asuncion, in an acting capacity.

Asuncion was the BuCor’s deputy director for operations, according to the BuCor list of officers posted on the bureau’s website.

The agency’s officials led by outgoing general manager Jose Ferdinand Rojas II welcomed Balutan and Corpuz on Thursday.

There was no official statement on the reason for the reassignment of Balutan to PCSO after no less than Justice Secretary Vitaliano II Aguirre announced last month that Balutan was waiting for this papers for his assumption as head of the BuCor.

In an earlier interview, Balutan had even bared his plan to set up a detention facility in the historic Caballo Island off Cavite as an annex of the New Bilibid Prisons (NBP) in Muntinlupa City.

Balutan said the isolated prison facility would not replicate the former Alcatraz prison in the US where hardened criminals were isolated, but it will be a reformation center for convicts in the minimum security compound of the NBP.

He said a total of 160 inmates in the NBP minimum security compound will be transferred to the island prison once construction of the new facility is completed.

Balutan, who retired from military service after he accepted his appointment as head of BuCor, would now assumed as PCSO general manager.

“We don’t know what happened along the way,” one senior military official said on Balutan’s sudden appointment to the PCSO. With Jaime Laude