Social Welfare and Development Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Soliman. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines—Social Welfare Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Soliman has begun looking into the reported dumping of rotten relief items for survivors of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” in the Visayas region, Malacañang said on Friday.
“This is now being investigated by Secretary Soliman… Where did it happen? How massive was it? Whose donation is it? There will be an accounting on how it did happen,” presidential spokesperson Edwin Lacierda said in a Malacañang briefing.
Lacierda, however, said it would be premature to say who should be held liable for this.
Officials of the United Nations World Food Programme had expressed alarm over the admission by Mayor Remedios Petilla of Palo, Leyte, that she had authorized the dumping of food items, calling it inappropriate in a time of food insecurity.
Since they had been rotting in the municipal hall’s storage center, at least four sacks of rice and two sacks of used clothing were dumped in a garbage site in Barangay San Jose.
Petilla has defended her action, saying this was minimal compared with the huge volume of aid that the town had received.
Following reports that truckloads were dumped in the garbage dumpsite, Soliman sent a team to verify these.
Meanwhile, Lacierda appealed to foreign embassies to update the government about the status of their donations to private organizations for Yolanda survivors.
He said that if one accessed the website of the Foreign Aid Transparency Hub (FAiTH), one could find a discrepancy between the P25-billion total foreign pledge and the P600 million received by the government.
“The bulk of that is channeled by the foreign governments through their own development agencies or, for instance, Red Cross, which we do not track in the first version of the website,” he said.
By updating the website (www.gov.ph/faith), the government is enabling donor governments to post updates about the total amounts of their assistance, like how much remained, and to which agency this was given.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), for its part, assured the public that donations received by the Catholic Church for victims of Yolanda are all accounted for.
“All donations to Caritas Philippines and Internationalis have strict and efficient accounting mechanisms and processes. We have our monitoring system as part of observing the stewardship principle,” said Fr. Edu Gariguez, executive secretary of the CBCP National Secretariat for Social Action-Justice and Peace.
“Our finances are received and audited by an external accounting firm following international standard,” he added.
Gariguez’s statement came after Soliman admitted earlier that nobody was keeping tabs on donations given to private, aid and religious organizations for survivors of Yolanda.
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