OFWs add to solon’s troubles before House ethics committee

ACTS-OFW Rep. Aniceto Bertiz III has a lot of explaining to do, according to two migrant workers—members of the sector he’s tasked to represent—who filed complaints against him in the House committee on ethics on Thursday.

The first complainant was Sheila Mabunga, a former overseas Filipino worker (OFW) who accused the partylist lawmaker’s former recruitment agency of engaging in human trafficking.

The other was Emmanuel Villanueva, an OFW in Hong Kong and secretary general of the Migrante-United Filipinos chapter in the Chinese administrative region.

Speaking at a press conference called by lawmakers known as the Makabayan bloc, Mabunga said she applied to become a cook in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at a recruitment agency owned by Bertiz’s wife. However, her papers ended up with Bertiz’s agency, Global Asia Alliance Consultants Inc.

Maltreatment

When she arrived in Saudi Arabia in 2014, Mabunga recalled, she ended up with another employer who maltreated her.

“The [name of the] employer on my contract [was different from] the one on my working visa,” she said, adding that she became half-paralyzed due to the beatings she suffered from her employer. The abuses prompted her father to seek government assistance to have her repatriated, she said.

But Bertiz convinced her to stay with her employer just a while longer, she said, and promised to bring her home to the Philippines and send her to college on the condition that she would not file a complaint against his agency.

Mabunga said that when she returned to her employer, she suffered more abuse until she was finally repatriated in August 2015. Bertiz, she said, failed to fulfill his promises, prompting her to file a complaint in the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency and National Labor Relations Commission in 2016.

“Until now, justice eludes me. I get more hurt when I see him on television acting like he is pro-OFW and angry at illegal recruiters,” she told reporters. “How can you say you represent 10 million OFWs when you can’t even act on the complaint of one OFW like me?” Mabunga said.

Villanueva, the second complainant, called for Bertiz’s ouster from Congress.

He recounted a confrontation he had with the lawmaker in January 2017 while his group was having a dialogue with then Labor Undersecretary Joel Maglungsod over Migrante’s demand for the scrapping of the overseas employment certificate (OEC).

Not invited

Bertiz was not invited to the dialogue, Villanueva said, yet he showed up and delivered a long lecture on the need for the OEC and his proposed ID for OFWs.

Villanueva said he politely asked the lawmaker not to hog the discussion, only to be yelled at and be accused of being an undocumented OFW.

A video of the argument between the two men went viral earlier this week, after Bertiz drew flak for two more recent incidents: When he berated an airport security officer, and when he told an audience of successful board examinees that they would not get their professional license if they didn’t know who Special Assistant to the President Christopher “Bong” Go was.

Along with other OFW groups, Migrante has drafted an online petition asking for Bertiz’s removal from Congress for conflict of interest, noting that he was never an OFW but a recruiter who should not be recognized as a legitimate representative of migrant workers.

Reached for comment, Bertiz’s chief of staff, Jun Aguilar, told reporters that the congressman was “ready to face” the new ethics case.

Aguilar stressed that Bertiz had already divested himself of his shares in the recruitment agency following his election to Congress.

‘Settled’

According to  Aguilar, he was told by the new owner of the agency that Mabunga’s case had already been “settled.”

The House ethics committee earlier said it would be investigating the congressman for harassing a security officer at Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

Shortly after a video of the incident went viral, Bertiz issued a public apology and likened his behavior to a woman having her monthly period, a remark that did not sit well with some of his House colleagues.