Contained

It seems more apparent, with every passing episode of this complex saga over the misuse of pork barrel funds, that the scope of investigation is being limited and the number of politicians to be smeared contained.

This may not be due entirely to partisan motivation. There are real institutional limits to how many investigations may be undertaken simultaneously.

Then there is the matter of the public’s attention span. There is only so much scandal the public can absorb at any given time.

Looting of the pork barrel has been a systemic problem for decades. It is not an aberration; it has been the norm. The dirty secret has been an open one. The looting provided the grease on which patronage politics run.

Anyone who says the looting of the pork barrel is news is either lying or terribly uninformed. Few of the present crop of politicians will spend so much to win public office if there was no means to recover electoral investments.

If the full scale of the looting is unveiled, it would implicate the entire political class.  The Ombudsman will be swamped. The courts will be deluged. Our Congress will be emptied — or converted into a concentration camp for erring politicians.

In a political system infused with a lot more gallantry and patriotism, a collective act of contrition by the entire political class might have immediately followed the release of the COA special audit on the use of pork barrel funds. A Truth Commission might have been organized in place of individual prosecution of each and every political personality. The President might have set the tone by ordering his pork barrel records as congressman and then as senator revealed. We should not have waited for the Supreme Court to declare the PDAF unconstitutional before taking decisive steps to purge the system of pork.

Ours, however, is a political culture seriously wanting in gallantry. The President’s pork barrel record is treated as state secret. A full accounting of the money that flowed through the “disbursement acceleration program” (DAP) has yet to happen.

Of the many fake NGOs identified in the COA report, only a small minority are linked to Janet Napoles. There seems to be little effort to unmask the others, especially those used by the Department of Agriculture. The investigation of dozens of other legislators named in the COA report appears to have been archived. We hear very little about the administration allies linked to pork misuse, including those involving former Customs chief Ruffy Biazon, House deputy speaker Neptali Gonzales and Tesda head Joel Villanueva.

By confining the inquiries to the Napoles-linked NGOs, the magnitude of this scandal is contained, even downsized. It is as if the political class is simply waiting for the storm of public outrage to pass before returning to business as usual.

Kingpin

Until we get the final numbers on the funds released through the DAP to augment legislative pork during the Corona impeachment episode, we will not know how much was looted. In addition to the PDAF, declared unconstitutional, there are several other pork mechanisms available to our legislators including Various Infrastructures including Local Projects (VILP).

The plunder case filed three years ago against former Speaker Arnulfo Fuentebella is illustrative of the many channels available to politicians to slip the pork through. The case was initially filed on the basis of the findings of the COA special report. That complaint has since been amended to include new evidence found.

The initial complaint stemmed from the illicit diversion of over P80 million in public funds for public works projects located within the Fuentebellas’ sprawling properties in Tigaon and Sagnay in Camarines Sur. A supplemental complaint was filed after the release of the COA’s special audit covering the years 2007-2009. Including the audit findings, the irregular fund disbursement attributable to Fuentebella amounts to P120.27 million, double the threshold for the crime of plunder.

Unlike the three senators now in trouble for pork misuse, Fuentebella did not use Napoles NGOs. He used his own NGOs as channel for diverting pork funds.

The COA, for instance, identifies P18.6 million from Fuentebella’s PDAF transferred to an NGO called the Partido District Development Cooperative Inc. (PDDCI) “despite the absence of a law appropriating or specially earmarking the same.” The questionable NGO is headed by Ariel Alde, said to be Funtebella’s erstwhile driver. It is not even registered with the SEC or with the Cooperative Development Authority. Pork funds were channeled to this entity through the now infamous Technology Resource Center.

Using his influence as a ranking member of Congress, Fuentebella was instrumental in legislating into existence a GOCC called the Partido Development Authority (PDA). “Partido” is that section of Camarines Sur controlled by the Fuentebella family for over a century now. Recently, there were moves to gerrymander this poverty-stricken territory into an entirely new province.

The COA discovered that this particular GOCC singlehandedly plunged the national government over P1 billion into foreign and domestic debts. It used to be headed by now Rep. Felix William Fuentebella. If this administration was serious in scrapping loss-generating, corruption-plagued GOCCs, the PDA should figure high in the list.

Notwithstanding the hundreds of millions in operational losses due to gross mismanagement, the PDA is embarrassingly deep in debt with international development agencies. HB 2867, filed by Rep. Rufus Rodriguez seeking the abolition of losing GOCCs, includes the PDA in its abolition list, along with such notorious agencies as Nabcor and ZNAC.