ON TARGET
The honest PCGG head
By Ramon TulfoPhilippine Daily Inquirer
The present chair of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), Andres Bautista, wants his agency abolished because of the high cost of maintaining it.
This shows that Bautista, who left a high-paying corporate job to join the government of President Noy, is not corrupt.
If Bautista were corrupt, he would insist that the PCGG continue to exist so he could make oodles and oodles of money.
He is so unlike most other PCGG chairs and commissioners who ran the agency before him.
The previous PCGG officials used the perks and privileges of their positions to amass wealth.
One of Bautista’s predecessors allegedly spent the bribes from PCGG-sequestered corporations and from individuals under investigation by the agency on his lovers.
The same PCGG official also reportedly squandered hundreds of thousands every day at the casinos.
Officials and people who volunteered to work for the PCGG in its early days were worse.
They performed their jobs with spite, vengeance and thievery on their minds.
They allegedly looted the mansions and resorts of the Marcoses and their cronies.
Not content with stealing from the properties of the Marcoses and their cronies and extorting money from sequestered firms, they destroyed whatever things they could get their hands on.
Then President Cory, the President’s mother, probably didn’t know what was going on as these thieves and vandals were not kicked out.
* * *
The PCGG should have been abolished a long time ago, months after it was created to go after the wealth of the Marcoses and their cronies.
Cory Aquino and the presidents who succeeded her didn’t choose well the people who would run the agency.
The PCGG officials were like bulls in a china shop.
The Marcos wealth recovered by the PCGG for the government could not equal the amounts of money its rapacious officials had stolen.
President Noy made a very wise choosing Bautista as PCGG head because the latter was honest enough to admit that the government is wasting money on the agency.
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