Belmonte hints at new ‘pork barrel’

By: Marc Jayson Cayabyab - 10 years ago

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. on Monday hinted a possible replacement for the graft-tainted Priority Development Assistance Funds (PDAF) at the height of the alleged scam of pillaging these funds to ghost projects for kickbacks.

In his speech on the opening of the 16th Congress’ second regular session, Belmonte said the House of Representatives is faced with a new challenge of bringing services to their constituencies especially after the major sources of funds were declared unconstitutional.

Belmonte cited the Supreme Court decisions striking down the Priority Development Assistance Funds (PDAF) and declaring parts of President Benigno Aquino III’s Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) as unconstitutional.

“Recent rulings of the Supreme Court on the PDAF and the DAP have created new challenges to the Legislature,” Belmonte said.

“PDAF, which formed part of the national government budget for decades, is now unconstitutional. Likewise, the use of savings for certain purposes through the Disbursement Acceleration Program was, subject to a pending motion for reconsideration, also declared unconstitutional,” he added.

Due to the striking down of Congress’ major sources of funds for representatives’ pet projects, Belmonte said the chamber should find ways to fund their pet projects.

He said legislators’ pet projects for decades have been funded with the discretionary allocations of PDAF.

“We need to explore new legislative paths to bringing needed resources and services to our people,” Belmonte said.

The PDAF was used in the alleged pork barrel scam, by which millions of state funds were purportedly pillaged to ghost projects for kickbacks under the scheme of Janet Lim-Napoles.

Meanwhile, some parts of the DAP, mainly President Aquino’s savings impounding mechanism, was struck down as unconstitutional amid allegations that funds from it were given to senators as incentives for voting for the ouster of Supreme Court Justice Renato Corona.