MANILA, Philippines — The "belatedly released" government document showing a fund release confirmed that the Office of the Vice President received its confidential funds through the Office of the President, a lawmaker said.
During the last day of budget deliberations at the plenary, Rep. Edcel Lagman (Albay, 1st District) furnished the media with a copy of the Special Allotment Release Order (SARO) that he says confirms the irregular manner in which the OVP got a hold of the P125 million in confidential funds in 2022.
The SARO, which the OVP provided the House, confirms that "the source of the 125M is the president's contingent fund; and the purpose of the SARO is to grant confidential funds to the OVP," Lagman said.
"The contingent fund cannot be given to an agency as confidential funds when such agency has not been allocated any confidential fund in the 2022 GAA," he said.
Otherwise, this would derogate the clear intention of the Congress not to allocate confidential funds to the OVP which, in the first place, was not requested by the then-Vice President Leni Robredo.
The SARO itself is "flawed and invalid," Lagman said, as contingent funds "cannot be used for confidential expenses."
The newly shared SARO from the OVP follows yesterday's public release of the OVP's letter to the DBM in 2022 that requested P250 million in confidential funds. The letter was sent less than a month after Vice President Sara Duterte began her term.
These two documents detail how the OVP acquired P150 million in confidential funds despite not having the allocation in the 2022 General Appropriations Act. It follows Duterte's repeated refusals in House committee budget deliberations to answer lawmakers on how she acquired and spent the funds.
Lagman on Tuesday said that the OVP's letter shows it “requested for the release of funds by augmentation and for confidential funds, both of which are prohibited.”
In an interview with ANC's Headstart on Tuesday, lawyer and former spokesperson of former Vice President Leni Robredo said that the onus is on the executive branch to prove that ther was no transfer of funds as "simply claiming it's not a transfer is not going to be enough."