Gov’t to file 4 graft raps vs Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, says Abad

Thanks to the Senate investigations, the Aquino administration hopes to file corruption charges against former President and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo before Christmas, Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said on Tuesday.

Abad was asked in a meeting with the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines to comment on President Aquino’s statement early this year that at least four cases were being prepared against his predecessor.

“There is a group doing work on that and I am not at liberty at this stage to tell you what is the progress but certainly the President is determined to pursue the cases before the year ends,” Abad said.

Pressed on whether these cases would be filed before Christmas, Abad admitted without elaboration that recent investigations in the Senate “have helped us accelerate the preparation of these cases.”

“And hopefully, we don’t need to have to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ while filing the case,” he said.

Look at evidence

Abad quoted the President as saying that “we’re not going to be running after the people because they’re in the past administration but let’s look at the evidence and let’s see where the evidence leads us.”

Before the Aquino administration took over last year, Abad said that there was “no internal control system in the bureaucracy.”

Arroyo, he said, had control of the national budget throughout her 10 years in power when it was reenacted except for one time.

“Practically the whole budget was the President’s budget with very little limits to it because everything else became like one big pork barrel for the President except for salaries and overhead,” Abad said.

And because the budget was reenacted, he said that “everything became huge lump sums all over the place and that created a lot of opportunity for corruption.”

“You can talk to every department in this country and they have stories about how loosely money was used by the previous government,” he said.

Question of credibility

Abad said while the congressional investigations were being conducted, the government had been “quietly doing its research, bidding its own case against who we feel are principal players in the problem.”

The President’s instruction was for the government to “focus on those guys who are responsible for it,” he said.

Plunder cases have been filed against Arroyo since June 2010 by various groups and politicians. The charges stemmed from the aborted $329-million NBN-ZTE deal, the sale of the old Iloilo airport to Megaworld Corp. in 2007, the alleged misuse of more than P550 million from the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration, the release of nearly P1.6 billion in fertilizer funds to politicians, and the alleged misuse of P325 million in intelligence funds of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.