Conflict of interest bill fild in House

A bill has been filed at the House of Representatives imposing a three-year ban on Cabinet officials from engaging in businesses related to the positions they would vacate if they leave the Cabinet.

House Bill No. 3758 seeks to address issues of conflict of interest by preventing Cabinet officials from engaging in employment or businesses related to their previous government posts three years after leaving government service.

“This will prevent such officials from continuing to exert undue influence on both government and industry after they have already left government service,” said the bill, authored by Rep. Winston Castelo.

HB 3758 will also bar officials from returning to their family-owned businesses that deal directly with their previous agency in government.

Raging issue

The bill said conflict of interest has been a raging issue lately in the House, particularly in the committee on transportation, which is hearing proposed emergency powers to address the traffic crisis.

At a recent hearing of the House committee on appropriations, Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez warned Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade that, just like in the previous administrations, some officials had prioritized the interests of their former “principals.”

The bill comes in the wake of results of survey that showed concern about corruption is still high, particularly among Cebuano businessmen.

During a presentation in Cebu City on Oct. 12 for the Social Weather Stations 2016 Enterprise Survey on Corruption, it was shown that 54 out of 100 respondents in Metro Cebu still believe there is “a lot of corruption” in the public sector.

Personal knowledge

The result is 21 percentage points higher than the 33 percent recorded during a similar survey among Cebuano businessmen in 2012.

Among those in Cebu that said there is corruption in government, 40 percent claimed that they had personal knowledge of public sector corruption within their line of business in the last three months, up from 28 percent in 2015. —WITH A REPORT FROM VICTOR ANTHONY SILVA