Former police general convicted of graft for overpricing

The Sandiganbayan Third Division on Thursday convicted a former director of the Philippine National Police Academy of graft for overpricing the cost of a training facility in Bongao, Tawi Tawi, in 2001.

The antigraft court sentenced Chief Superintendent Dionisio Coloma to six to 10 years’ imprisonment after finding him guilty of claiming that the budget for the construction of a training facility, which consisted of several buildings, was P5.727 million, when the cost only amounted to P3.18 million.

The court also said Coloma had claimed that the construction of certain buildings had already begun when work had actually not started, and that he also failed to comply with the project program for the training facility, which specified that one of the buildings was to have a barracks for fifty people.

Coloma had denied the allegations.

But in its ruling handed down Thursday, the antigraft court said Coloma had acted with evident bad faith in his transactions concerning the training site.

It said the prosecution was able to show the construction caused undue injury to the government by giving a detailed breakdown of the facilities and materials for the project.

It said the difference between the cost estimate for the project given by Coloma and the cost given by the project engineer amounted to a loss to the government amounting to P2.5 million. It added that the difference became more evident considering that the barracks was not even constructed.

It also said the witnesses’ testimonies showed that as of June 2002, no trace of an excavation was found at the training site, belying the police official’s claim that construction had already started.

The court also found that despite the specification that one of the barracks was supposed to have a fifty-person capacity, the barracks on the training site could only be occupied by twenty-six people.

As for Coloma’s contention that he had nothing to do with the construction of the training facility, the court said he was one of the signatories on the current accounts for the creditors of the Philippine Public Safety College. The PPSC funded the construction of the training facility.

It said that by making himself a signatory to the current accounts, Coloma caused the PPSC to lose control of the funds for the training facility since only authorized signatories could enter into transactions with regard to the project.