DBM says ‘realignment’ of DAP call of 4 senators

Sen.Vicente Sotto III, Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, Sen. Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. and Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. FILE PHOTOS

It may have released P370 million from the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) to Senators Jinggoy Estrada, Ramon Revilla Jr., Vicente Sotto III and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. between December 2011 and March 2012, but the “realignment” of the funds to Janet Lim-Napoles’ bogus nongovernment organizations was entirely the four senators’ doing, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) said on Friday.

The DBM was also adamant in claiming that the four senators were not “early birds” in receiving DAP funds for their pet projects to dispel the notion that the funds were given to induce the senators to vote to convict then Chief Justice Renato Corona, stressing that the funds were released only after Corona was found guilty by the Senate impeachment court.

In a statement released on Friday by its public information unit, the DBM said the P370 million was first released to the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) in December 2011, the same month that the House of Representatives impeached Corona in one day.

However, according to the DBM, the four senators then requested that the funds be realigned to the National Livelihood Development Corp. (NLDC) which released the funds to the chosen foundations of the four in March 2012, in the middle of the Corona impeachment trial which ran from January to May 2012.

“After the releases were made to DAR, however, the four senators requested the realignment of these funds to a different implementing agency, the National Livelihood Development Corp.,” the DBM said.

“The four senators essentially asked us to change the implementing agency from DAR to NLDC. In their requests, Senators Marcos, Estrada, Sotto and Revilla changed their nominated projects to programs for displaced or marginal families, for which NLDC was specified by the senators’ offices as the implementing arm,” the DBM said.

It thus withdrew the earlier special release allotment order (Saro) for the DAR and issued these instead to the NLDC in March 2012, “exactly as the senators requested,” the DBM said.

The state-owned NLDC has emerged as the implementing agency of choice for dubious projects proposed to be funded from senators’ and representatives’ pork barrel and DAP funds.

According to affidavits and documents submitted by the whistle-blowers in the P10-billion pork barrel scam, the NLDC was the main conduit used for billions of pesos of legislators’ pork barrel funds that ended up in seven fake Napoles-controlled NGOs carrying out nonexistent projects.

The NLDC, which is managed by the Land Bank of the Philippines, is the main lending agency for poor farmers in unserved, sparsely populated areas of the country.

The P370 million is part of the P475 million in funds that the DBM gave the DAR as lump sum allocations for six senators, to bankroll livelihood projects of local government units, which the Inquirer reported on Sept. 20, 2013.

Malacañang confirmed on Thursday that the P370 million that went to the four senators came from DAP—a little-known impounding mechanism for supposed government savings that came to light last September after Estrada said each senator who voted to convict Corona had received P50 million to P100 million in additional pork barrel funds as “incentive.”

Aside from Estrada, Sotto, Revilla and Marcos, the other recipients of the aborted DAR funds were Senators Juan Ponce Enrile (P55 million) and Loren Legarda (P50 million). The Inquirer has not yet verified where the funds of Enrile and Legarda went.

According to the DBM, the release of funds from the DAP for projects endorsed by the four senators was in response to fund requests from the senators’ offices in November 2011, a month after DAP was launched as a so-called “stimulus fund” that October.

In its statement, the DBM insisted that there were no “early birds” in the release of the DAP funds, claiming that several releases charged against DAP for various projects and programs were made from October to December 2011.

The releases for projects nominated by Marcos, Estrada, Sotto and Revilla were first made in December 2011, after their offices had submitted the proper requirements, it said.

“The fund releases for the projects backed by the four senators were originally made to DAR to support beneficiaries under the agency’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program,” said the DBM.

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