COA chief attending Malampaya fund probe

MANILA, Philippines - The Senate Blue Ribbon committee will hold its first hearing on the Malampaya Fund scam tomorrow with Commission on Audit chairman Maria Gracia Pulido-Tan and assistant commissioner Susan Garcia as resource persons.

Blue Ribbon committee chairman Teofisto Guingona III said that the hearings would focus on the findings of the COA in its audit of the Malampaya Fund releases to the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) in November 2009.

An investigation was first announced in September but this was postponed because Tan and Garcia were unavailable.

He said the two COA officials’ presence is necessary because the committee intends to start its hearings with the audit report on the Malampaya Fund.

Garcia headed the team that conducted the audit. The team noted that DAR’s requests for funds from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) “resulted in great loss of public money.”

In seeking the funds, DAR was purportedly acting on the requests of 97 mayors for financial assistance for agrarian reform support services.

According to the audit report, the letter requests did not come from the mayors but from non-government organizations to which the funds were transferred.

Twenty-eight of the letter-requests were prepared even before the DAR submitted its request for funds.

It was noted that even before the DBM approved the requests, DAR had already entered into memoranda of agreements with 12 non-governement organizations (NGOs) in the amount of P900 million.

The COA report pointed out that the very existence of the 12 NGOs was questionable and the implementation of the 97 projects costing P900 million was highly irregular.

The NGOs turned out to be linked to businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles, the alleged mastermind of the pork barrel scam.

Napoles has been charged with plunder before the Sandiganbayan along with Sens. Ramon Revilla Jr., Jinggoy Estrada and Juan Ponce Enrile in relation to the pork barrel scam.

During the Blue Ribbon committee’s hearings on the pork barrel scam, Napoles’ former employees led by her cousin Benhur Luy, admitted forging documents related to the Malampaya Fund releases.