Lawyer identifies alleged rice import scam brains
MANILA, Philippines – An activist lawyer has identified the alleged bagman “Buddy R” who was accused of pocketing kickbacks from the government’s rice importation program.
Lawyer Argee Guevarra said in an Inquirer Radio 990 AM interview that Buddy R’s name is one Alfredo Roa, a former customs broker.
“He was involved from start to finish in the negotiations of exchange of kickbacks for the Vietnamese rice importation last April,” Guevarra said in the report, referring to an April 2013 deal between the Philippines and Vietnam.
The leader of militant group Sanlakas, Guevarra earlier said a certain “Buddy R” cornered contracts within the agriculture department for rice importation while delivering kickbacks to officials involved in the deals.
He earlier told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that Buddy R received kickbacks from the importation last November of 500,000 metric tons of rice that were overpriced by up to P400 million.
The November rice importation was supposed to augment the decline in rice production after Yolanda, the world’s strongest typhoon that made landfall in the Philippines last November.
“The transaction was stampeded using the catastrophe that was inflicted by Yolanda to our rice stocks,” Guevarra said.
The Sanlakas official went on to say that the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) should go after Roa as the real brains of a rice importation scam, not David Tan, believed to be a rice smuggling kingpin who allegedly built a network of smugglers and paid off customs employees with cash gifts worth P6 billion.
“This David Tan character is a figment of (Agriculture secretary Proceso) Alcala’s imagination,” Guevarra said.
In a Philippine Daily Inquirer report, Guevarra earlier identified three more smuggling operators – a certain David Lim from Cebu, Jojo Soliman from Binondo, and another woman known among officials as the Janet Lim-Napoles of the agriculture department.
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