Emotional Faeldon admits corruption still exists at Customs

MANILA, Philippines — Customs Commissioner Nicanor Faeldon admitted on Tuesday that there is still corruption in his agency more than a year after he was appointed to the office by President Rodrigo Duterte.

Faeldon however said that cleaning up the Customs bureau has been difficult because many of the personnel needed to investigate irregularities were appointed only in December 2016 or January this year.

“Yes, your honor,” Faeldon answered Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV when asked if there was still corruption in the bureau he heads.

Faeldon, who turned emotional at times, was speaking at a Senate investigation into the shipment of billions of illegal drugs that passed through Customs checks but later seized in a Valenzuela City warehouse.

The hearing saw the Customs chief and Trillanes, former comrades in the Magdalo group, engage in heated and testy exchanges.

Faeldon accused Trillanes of being a liar for supposedly peddling stories of corruption in the BOC that had already affected the families of the “good guys” working there.

“The good guys in the bureau are being persecuted. Preposterous stories by him and pupunta pa siya dito sa Senate asking questions,” a teary-eyed Faeldon told reporters. “And this storyteller magtatanung-tanong pa diyan. As far as Trillanes is concerned, he’s a liar.”

Faeldon explained that he cannot clean up the agency alone nor deputize people in the agency suspected of receiving bribes to lead corruption probes.

“The appointment of the officers in charge in the investigation was just January, December. So for the first six months, I was there working alone,” he said.

He added: “Here comes a new commissioner who has no teammate with him for six months, how can he investigate this? It’s very impossible for me to man the more than 30 collection ports all over the country, and then at the same time conduct an investigation of all this.”

'Tara' system

Faeldon described the ‘tara’ system being used by people who need to transact with the BOC to ensure that their imported goods would not encounter a problem.

“There are certain amounts allotted to the different offices and officials of the bureau in exchange for uninterrupted facilitation of their trade,” he told the Senate panel.

He said that he had not yet received any names of people in the BOC involved in the system from importers and traders despite his repeated pleas for them to do so.

“Twelve thousand po sila [importers]. Nakikiusap ako, please go to my office and tell me who are these people asking for 'tara'. Until today, the 12,000 importers have not come up with a name of any official of the bureau asking for 'tara',” he said.

Faeldon and other officials of the BOC are currently under intense congressional criticism following their failure to stop the entry of P6.4 billion worth of shabu from China.

Trillanes, in a statement days ago, said that Faeldon is “at the heart” of the controversy hounding the agency.

Trillanes and Faeldon used to be members of the Magdalo group that staged two coup attempts against President Gloria Arroyo. The senator said that the two of them were still in good terms until the national elections last year, when they supported different candidates.

Duterte has rejected calls for him to sack his Customs chief, saying he would first wait for the probes into the mess to wrap up before making any decision.