'OSG, PNB executives joined PCGG officials in foreign travel binge'

MANILA, Philippines - Executives from the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) and former government-controlled bank Philippine National Bank (PNB) went on extravagant and unnecessary foreign travels with the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) in their jet-setting years during the time of former chairman Camilo Sabio.

An audit of the present PCGG, headed by chairman Andres Bautista, showed that while the PCGG officials under Sabio and his close friend and law school classmate, former ambassador to Moscow and PCGG commissioner for litigation Jaime Bautista, ran up travel expenses up to $2.27 million charged to the PNB special legal fund, the OSG and PNB also had their share of globe-trotting which they funded from the PNB special legal fund set up by the late PCGG chairman Haydee Yorac in 2004.

The audit showed that a total of US$3,964,102.97 was disbursed from the PNB fund for travel alone between Jan. 31, 2004 and Sept. 30, 2010.

“Of this amount, $2,276,478.46 was used by PCGG; $1,520,778.03 was used by the OSG; and $166,846.48 by the PNB,” the audit findings said.

“There are no liquidation reports on file. The use of the $2,276,478.46 for PCGG travels has not been accounted for or audited at all,” the audit report declared.

Aside from discovering the lack of liquidation, the audit uncovered the lavish spending in the foreign travels, with business class ticket payments, fat travel allowances separate from a “contingency fund that ranged from $1,000 to $36,000, and unexplainable large delegations.”

Worse, the audit also found several instances wherein the PCGG had already charged the PNB fund, and also collected airfare expenses and travel allowances from other PCGG-controlled corporations, for certain trips.

The PNB special legal contingency fund was set up by Yorac with a start-up of $30 million deposited with the PNB as a contingency fund to cover legal, administrative and other related expenses to pursue the $22-million West LB case in Singapore, and the $30-million Arelma account in Merrill Lynch in New York.

The audit found that Sabio had gone on more than 50 foreign trips between September 2005 and June 2010 at the end of the term of former president and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

His close friend and law school classmate, Bautista, which he had first hired into the PCGG as a legal consultant, and then as a commissioner of the PCGG, had racked up “approximately 60 foreign trips between June 2006 and May 2010.”

“The former members of the Commission and certain officials traveled so frequently that it is indeed suspect whether such trips were really necessary and advantageous to the government interests which the Commission are mandated to protect,” the report said.

The current PCGG also found instances of double-charging or double-billing of foreign travels, since one trip had already been charged to the PNB fund.

Some were also charged to funds of the Coconut Industry Investment Fund (CIIF) Oil Mills Group or CIIF-OMG, which is the holding company of the oil milling companies bought from the coconut levy fund.