More midnight advance payments bared in CHED documents

The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) has made more than P75-million early payments to the contractor of its controversial P300-million call center laboratory development project.

Additional documents obtained by The STAR showed that aside from four disbursement vouchers that he issued last August, then outgoing CHED acting chairman Carlito Puno had signed a check worth P10.9 million in July in favor of E-Services Global Solutions Inc. (ESGS).

The four disbursement vouchers signed by Puno in favor of ESGS amounted to P55,963,451.68.

Apart from the July check, Puno issued checks dated Aug. 2 (P18,012,213.66); Aug. 13 (P23,290,061.45) and Aug. 3 (P3,744,674.81).

One of CHED’s four commissioners, Luningning Misuarez-Umar, during her brief stint as acting chairman in July in one of Puno’s absences, also signed a disbursement check in favor of ESGS for P19,876,434.21.

All the disbursements were supposedly for civil works conducted by ESGS under the commission’s Integrated Multi-Site Business Process Outsourcing Incubation Contact Centers (BPO-ICC) project.

The payments made to the ESGS consortium have raised questions among CHED personnel who pointed out that the project was supposed to have been undertaken on a turnkey arrangement wherein the contractor would be paid after construction of the call center training labs and their handover to CHED.