Gov’t execs linked to Pharmally deal may be guilty of document falsification — Carpio

MANILA, Philippines — Government officials involved in the signing of inspection documents for medical supplies purchased from Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. even if the items were still in China may be guilty of falsification of public documents, retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio said Friday.

“It’s very clear when they signed the inspection report that they examined the goods, they inspected the goods but the goods were not there. It was still in China. That’s clearly falsification of a public document,” Carpio told an online forum when asked of the possible case that can be filed on the Pharmally scandal.

“There will be many others but we will see as the investigation unfolds but that’s one thing I can say is very clear already, because the inspectors of the PS-DBM (Procurement Service – Department of Budget and Management) admitted that they signed the inspection reports without seeing the goods,” he added.

The Senate blue ribbon committee is currently investigating the procurement of allegedly overpriced PPEs bought by the PS-DBM on behalf of the Department of Health (DOH) in 2020. During the hearings, senators have questioned Pharmally, one of the suppliers, for bagging over P8 billion worth of contracts in 2020 despite being only several months old and having just P625,000 in paid-up capital.

“Pharmally was just a paper corporation, yet Pharmally bagged a total of P8.9 billion worth of negotiated contracts with PS-DBM in just three months in 2020. This is a record in the Philippines if not in the world,” said Carpio.

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Senators later learned that documents for the delivery of billions of pesos worth of medical supplies bought by the PS-DBM from Pharmally were prepared and signed even as the purchased items were still to be shipped from China. This raised suspicion among senators on the possibility that the supply contracts involving the company were ghost deliveries.

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Citing sources, Senator Panfilo Lacson added that a C-130 military cargo plane was supposedly used in the delivery of the medical supplies procured from Pharmally.

“AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) planes and Philippine Navy ships picked up the goods in China. Philippine Marines trucks were used to transport the goods from the airport to the seaport to government warehouses. All these shipping expenses should be deducted,” Carpio noted.

“Now it’s very clear, only the President could have ordered the AFP planes and Navy ships to go to China. So the President was on top of the situation in the purchases of Pharmally,” he added.

Duterte earlier said he ordered the use of government planes to transport medical supplies bought by the government from China. However, National Task Force against COVID-19 chief implementer Carlito Galvez Jr. clarified that no government flights were used in the transportation of COVID-19 supplies brought from Pharmally.

For Carpio, there are “badges of fraud” in the purchase of medical items from the said corporation.“The test kits delivered by Pharmally had a six-month expiration period in violation of the bidding specifications that the expiration period should be two years that is why the Senate found out that half a billion pesos worth of test kits expired had to be thrown away—a huge waste of government resources,” the retired High Court justice said. “So all these facts show badges of fraud, what we lawyers call badges of fraud.”

The DOH earlier said the procured test kits with six-month shelf life early on the pandemic are not near expiry, noting that was the “standard shelf life of those novel diagnostic test kits at the time.”

/MUF