P500,000 cash gift still a mystery
By Tonette Orejas
Central Luzon Desk
First Posted 22:51:00 10/11/2008
CITY OF SAN FERNANDO -- Consider it an unsolved but nevertheless riveting mystery.
To Pampanga Gov. Eddie Panlilio, that was how the tale of the P500,000 that he got from Malacañang had turned out to be.
A year has passed and the pieces of the puzzle are almost complete, except for two questions: Who was the exact source of the cash? Why was it given in the first place?
Panlilio has no answer for the first. “Until now there is no sure source of the money,” he said on Friday.
What he knew, he said, are these: Mayors and governors had a meeting with President Macapagal-Arroyo in Malacañang on Oct. 11. After the meeting, a woman handed two brown bags to Bulacan Gov. Joselito Mendoza.
Mendoza handed one of the bags to then Panlilio’s chief of staff, Archimedes Reyes. Reyes said he notified Panlilio about what looked to him as a sandwich bag when their car reached Nagtahan Bridge in Manila, but which turned out to contain bundles of money amounting to P500,000.
Panlilio still has not come close to the truth. Replying to his written query, Malacañang told him none of its offices disbursed such an amount to him or for Pampanga.
Officials of the League of the Provinces of the Philippines, to which Panlilio belongs, did not help settle the matter. Instead, it gave contradictory replies, the governor said.
One day, they issued denials. The next days, they said the LPP owned the money for “capability program” for neophyte governors and wanted him to return to them the funds.
When they could not show him disbursement documents, “there was silence after that up till now,” Panlilio said.
The money has been kept in the vault of the provincial capitol as an evidence for a graft case filed by lawyer Oliver Lozano against Panlilio and Mendoza.
Investigation by the Senate blue ribbon committee did not get any farther except establishing that the money was disbursed within the grounds of Malacañang and that it was withdrawn, based on the paper binders on the money, from the Bank of Commerce branch in Angeles City.
“It wasn’t very clear really until now and even during the Senate hearing on who gave the money, from whose source the money came from,” Panlilio said.
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