Palace to tighten Malampaya fund use

MANILA, Philippines - Malacañang is working on tightening the use of the multibillion-peso funds from the Malampaya natural gas project in Palawan following reports on the alleged misuse of the proceeds by detained businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles and her cohorts in government, according to Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr.

Last week the Supreme Court temporarily stopped the release for this year of the Priority Development Assistance Fund or pork barrel allocations of lawmakers, and the Malampaya funds.

Belmonte said the Aquino administration has not released a single centavo of the government’s share of revenues from the natural gas project, estimated at P79 billion in 2011, for non-energy related projects.

Under the law, the fund must be utilized solely for energy-related expenses.

“President Aquino himself is thinking of issuing a clarification, perhaps in the form of a legal opinion from the justice secretary that those things or projects refer only to matters that somehow involved exploration and exploitation of oil,” Belmonte told reporters.

The House leader said most of the “enormous” and questionable releases from the Malampaya funds happened during the previous administration “on the basis of imaginary requests from municipalities” for projects.

Pork barrel scam whistle-blower Benhur Luy earlier told the Senate Blue Ribbon committee that Napoles siphoned millions of pesos from the Malampaya funds through 12 bogus non-government organizations that implemented ghost projects.

The Aquino administration has so far charged P2.87 billion from the fund, including P2 billion for the fuel requirements of the National Power Corp.-Small Power Utilities Group, P450 million for the Pantawid Pasada program, and P423 million for the purchase of the USS Hamilton cutter marine vessel to secure the perimeter of the Malampaya natural gas project.