Loopholes in drug rewards bared

Former anti-narcotics agent Mary Ong called the attention yesterday of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) over the current reward system for drug arrests, citing loopholes that may cause the government to go bankrupt.

Ong, more popularly known by her alias Rosebud, requested top PDEA and PNP officials to review the system on drug informants, saying Operation Plan: Private Eye has no specified ceilings for rewards.

Ong noted that the PDEA and the PNP’s Anti-Illegal Drugs-Special Operations Task Force (AID-SOT) allows an informant to get a reward of P1.144 million for every 100 kilos of shabu seized while reward is computed at 80 percent based on the computation for shabu.

"If that is the case, the regulation is open to corruption by local Customs and police personnel who can use dummies to tip off the whereabouts of container vans and abandoned warehouses to collect millions from the government coffers," Ong said in an interview.

She stressed that shabu and its precursors such as ephedrine are quite "cheap" in China so the police raiders "could unwittingly be helping drug couriers earn big bucks if they pretend to be informants tipping off deliveries."

Ong was a former anti-narcotics asset of the defunct PNP Narcotics Group in 1999 and 2000 under operation plans Cyclops and Athena. She lamented that she has yet to collect her agent fees, amounting to millions, in both operations from the government. - Christina Mendez