Acting DILG chief told: Quit over fire truck deal

A lawyer appealed to acting Interior Secretary Catalino Cuy to vacate his post after he opted to pursue the controversial contract for the purchase of P3-billion worth of fire trucks from an Austrian company.

In a 14-page letter, Leo Romero reminded Cuy that the purchase of 76 fire trucks by the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) from Rosenbauer International AG was the reason for the sacking by President Duterte of Ismael Sueno as interior secretary.

Romero is lawyer of former Abakada party-list Jonathan dela Cruz, who questioned at the Supreme Court the legality of two supply contracts that the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and the BFP had entered into with Rosenbauer.

He said Cuy “countermanded, contradicted and disrespectfully placed in the backburner” the President’s efforts to stem corruption in the government.

“You have made a mockery of the oft-repeated pronouncements of President Duterte that graft and corruption in government must stop,” he said.

Romero also chided Cuy, former director of the elite police Special Action Force, for refusing to furnish certified true copies of the two supply contracts for the Rosenbauer fire trucks.

In his reply to Romero’s request, Cuy denied claims that the contracts were replete with legal infirmities and that the “absence of any injunctive relief gives us no option except to comply” with the signed agreement.

But Romero argued that the signed deals should not be considered a “perfected contract” and a “government-to-government” agreement since they were “void from the beginning.”