MANILA, Philippines — Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno had allegedly tried to bribe congressmen with P40 billion in projects to make them stop their investigation into his supposedly anomalous budget practices and the multimillion-peso public works contracts bagged by his in-laws.
Camarines Sur Rep. Rolando Andaya Jr. revealed the supposed bribe offer yesterday after the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) chief snubbed for the sixth time the probe being conducted by the House of Representatives appropriations committee.
Diokno denied Andaya’s accusations.
“Absolutely false. It is again of one of his wild and baseless accusations. If I were trying to silence the committee, why would I even bother to submit to them the 2017 and 2018 savings for their review?” Diokno said.
Responding to the denial, Andaya said of Diokno, “He is lying through his teeth. Ask him to produce the CCTV footage (of the meeting).”
“Secretary Diokno, I know you are listening. After going to the media yesterday and saying you will attend our hearing, you chickened out and hid behind legal technicalities. I’m sorry but this is your chance to clear your name, which you missed,” he said.
Andaya, who chairs the appropriations committee, made the statement after reading a letter from the DBM chief, his Undersecretary Amenah Pangandaman and Ellen Tumang, a DBM division chief, explaining their absence. The letter was addressed to Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Andaya, Arroyo’s budget secretary when she was president, made the revelation about the alleged bribe try in the course of narrating to his colleagues why and how he decided to launch his investigation.
He said the attempt was made during a meeting between him and Diokno in September at the DBM office in Manila.
“He offered us P40 billion to buy our silence and for us to shut up about the P75-billion DBM insertion in the DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways) budget (for this year). He told me he would get the money from 2018 savings,” he said.
He said those present at the meeting were Pangandaman and former Leyte congressman Martin Romualdez, husband of incumbent Rep. Yedda Marie Romualdez, who heads the House accounts committee.
Andaya recounted that he and his colleagues decided to launch their inquiry after the budget secretary broke his promises to correct the inequitable distribution of infrastructure funds among congressional districts.
“We complained to him and other members of the economic team and even Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea. One district topped the list with more than P8 billion, while at the bottom was another district with P400 million,” Andaya said.
“We told them we would have problems with congressmen with his unfair allocation. They asked Secretary Diokno to make the corrections, but he did nothing,” he said.
Dubious savings
Andaya said he was not aware that the government had savings last year until Diokno mentioned them to him in September.
“That prompted me to inquire about savings last year and in 2017, and to subpoena the relevant documents. Secretary Diokno submitted them today, and based on these, P209 billion was saved in 2017 and an additional P97 billion in 2018. These formed part of the DBM and executive pork,” he explained.
He said the budget secretary’s decision to submit the documents in compliance with a House subpoena “means that he waived his right to invoke technicalities.”
“If he gave us the documents on which we will ask some questions, why did he refuse to appear before us? He is really afraid to be grilled about the P75-billion DBM insertion, the bribe offer and other issues,” he added.
He pointed out that if Diokno “is hoping for our investigation to go away, he is wrong, for we will pursue this even during our election campaign break.”
Andaya stressed that he found it odd that the government had huge savings last year and in 2017.
“They badgered us to impose new taxes on our people under TRAIN (Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion), and yet they just deposited their tax collections in the bank. The job of government is not to deposit money but to spend it for services for our people,” he said.
At yesterday’s hearing, three computer programmers of the DPWH reiterated that it was DBM Undersecretary Pangandaman and Tumang who asked them to encode the list of projects worth P75 billion in the DBM system last Jan. 13.
The encoders claimed that they did not have the time to inform their DPWH bosses of the DBM officials’ request as they were beating a deadline, though they said it was the first time they saw projects added to what their agency had already submitted to the DBM.– With Rhodina Villanueva