Palace to Binay: What are your solutions?

MANILA, Philippines - Malacañang scored Vice President Jejomar Binay for failing to provide solutions to the problems of the country that he listed in his counter State of the Nation Address (SONA), and urged him to answer the corruption allegations against him to gain credibility and moral ascendancy.

In a press briefing yesterday, Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr. said President Aquino monitored Binay’s counter SONA on Monday afternoon.

According to Coloma, Aquino said that Binay should have spoken up in the past five years as member of the Cabinet and not waited until it was time for his political campaign for the presidency.

Poe: Don’t criticize for politics’ sake

Sens. Grace Poe and Alan Peter Cayetano issued similar statements.

“No one is perfect but when you criticize, you should offer solutions and you should criticize not for personal or political purposes,” said Poe, who is leading surveys on preferred next president.

“He should first prove that allegations against him are false, such as the overpricing in the construction of the Makati City Hall Building II and the Makati Science High School Building. The people are more interested in hearing these issues,” Cayetano said.

Cayetano also reiterated his call for the Vice President to explain the alleged discrepancies in his latest statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN).

In his 2014 SALN, Binay declared that he has P38.843 million worth of cash on hand and in bank accounts.

But testimonies of witnesses and documentary evidence obtained in the hearings conducted by the Senate Blue Ribbon sub-committee showed that Binay allegedly has over P600 million worth of cash deposited in several bank accounts jointly owned by him and his alleged dummies.

Binay provided wrong figures

Malacañang also disputed the figures that Binay presented, saying these are incorrect.

Coloma said Binay apparently wanted to paint a picture of despair for the country as opposed to Aquino’s message of hope. But since the Aquino administration took office in 2010, poverty, unemployment, lack of educational attainment had been addressed by the government’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program.

Coloma noted concrete proof that quality of life of Filipinos had improved through the CCT program was bared in independent studies of the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.

Unemployment rate dropped to six percent, the Palace said.

Malacañang stood by the President’s statement that based on the estimate of the Department of Foreign Affairs, the number of overseas Filipino workers decreased from 9.51 million in 2011 to 9.07 million in December 2014 because of better opportunities here and not because of various crises that hit other countries as claimed by Binay.

Data from Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz also showed that 1,470,826 OFWs left the country in 2010; 1,667,831 in 2011; 1,802,031 in 2012; 1,836,345 in 2013; 1,832,668 in 2014; and 730,507 for the first semester of 2015.

Malacañang also said that Binay should not downplay the country’s good economy and upgrades from credit rating agencies because these could attract investments and benefit the public through having low interest rates in housing, car and other consumer loans.

Those from the middle class, the business process outsourcing sector and OFWs were able to invest because of good economic climate.

Coloma said a lot of public infrastructure programs were also carried out because of “long-term funds for infrastructure finance” due to the country’s improved credit rating.

And contrary to Binay’s claim, Coloma said the total budgetary allocation for state colleges and universities (SUCs) more than doubled (100.4 percent) during the term of Aquino.

According to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), the total allotment for the country’s tertiary education institutions has increased from P23.8 billion in 2010 to P47.7 billion this year, including “a net increase of P5.2 billion from P38 billion in 2014 to P43.3 billion in 2015.”

“All of the SUCs mentioned by Binay in his speech at the Cavite State University reflected increases in their respective budgets. The budget of the University of the Philippines has increased by 90 percent to P13.1 billion this year from P6.9 billion in 2010, while the funds allocated to CvSU has increased by almost 93 percent to P353 million in 2015 from about P183.5 million in 2010,” Coloma said. – With Delon Porcalla, Marvin Sy