Shredded peso bills unearthed in Pampanga work site

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga, Philippines — Men doing earth-moving works to install electric posts unearthed at least 30 sacks of shredded peso bills, some 500 meters from this city’s materials recovery facility (MRF) in Barangay (village) Lara on Monday.

Joselito Cabia, foreman of AT & E, said the bills were in P1,000, P500, P50 and P20 denominations. He thought these were play money at first.

The discovery attracted farmers who were hoping to find intact bills.

But a farmer who failed to find whole bills in the mound cursed aloud in frustration. “Nothing is whole here. Why weren’t these given to us instead?” he said.

Lawyer Thomas Cariño, manager of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) in this city, said the shredded bills belonged to the BSP.

He said the BSP contracted the garbage disposal unit of Barangay Sindalan to discard the bills before the May 2010 elections. The village council charged BSP P1 for every kilogram of shredded bills.

Cariño said BSP, under its “clean notes” policy, found the bills unfit for circulation so the agency had to shred them.

A committee in the agency’s branch here selected which bills from among those turned over by banks were unfit for circulation, he said.

“The [bills were] dirty so they could not be recycled,” he added.

Cariño said the BSP resorted to dumping bills instead of burning them in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

“They have no more value,” he said.