INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA — The Anti-Trapo Movement has filed three graft complaints with the Office of the Ombudsman against senior officials of the Office of the Cabinet Secretary, it said in a statement over the weekend.
A complaint was filed against Executive Assistant Aaron James Veloso and the Performance and Projects Management Office director, Lt. Col. Ranulfo Sevilla.
Veloso was accused of illegally appointing himself as acting Cabinet Secretary from Sept. 28 to 30 in 2016, when Secretary Leoncio Evasco, Jr., joined President Rodrigo Duterte’s official visit to Vietnam.
ATM said Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea only appointed him as officer-in-charge. It noted that only the President can designate an acting secretary under the Administrative Code of the Philippines.
Sevilla was accused of violating Section 6 of Executive Order No. 41, series of 1996, when he accepted his position despite the prohibition on active military personnel from assuming any plantilla position in any government agency.
Veloso was also named as respondent in a second complaint filed against CabSec officials for the illegal issuance of his travel authority by Assistant Secretary and Chief of Staff Isabelita Moncano-Somozo.
His alleged trip had no connection with the office’s functions and was supposedly personal in nature. ATM claimed that Veloso “used his close personal relationship” with Somozo for the approval of his travel authority, noting that he was not yet entitled to any creditable leaves at the time of his purported trip. ATM did not specify when the trip took place.
A complaint was also filed against Executive Director Gloria Jumamil-Mercado over several allegedly irregular, excessive and unsupported expenditures incurred by the Development Academy of the Philippines Graduate School of Public Development Management during her stint as its vice president in 2012.
ATM claimed that the irregular and excessive expenditures, which it did not specify, recurred in 2015. SFM