House panel to probe alleged ‘profiteering’ at SSS

INQUIRER PHOTO/GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

The House of Representatives would soon look into the alleged profiteering by several Social Security System (SSS) executives, who were accused of using its stockbrokers for their personal benefit.

House committee on banks and financial intermediaries chair Rep. Ben Evardone said on Tuesday that he would file a House resolution on Thursday to initiate an inquiry “in the exercise of its oversight functions.”

Evardone’s pronouncement came in light of SSS Commissioner Jose Gabriel La Viña’s filing of an administrative complaint for serious dishonesty and grave misconduct against executive vice-president for investments Rizaldy Capulong.

READ: SSS execs probed for profiteering

Capulong, as well as equities investment division chief Reginald Candelaria, equities product development head Ernesto Francisco Jr. and chief actuary George Ongkeko Jr., were accused of withholding the stockbrokers’ information from the SSS so they could corner the benefits of five companies’ initial public offerings for themselves.

Capulong was deemed by the SSS leadership to have illegally profited from his position since he used the very same stockbrokers who manage the state pension fund’s portfolio.

Besides the loss of profitable investment opportunities, Evardone said the House committee would also look into the possibility that SSS funds arising from ordinary employees’ contributions were misused.

“Aside from the issue of corruption, we will try to find out if SSS funds, which are owned by millions of members, were not lost in the transactions, especially in the light of the proposed increase in member’s contributions,” Evardone said.

“We should safeguard the SSS funds to ensure its viability and enable it to pay its obligations to its members,” he added.

Meanwhile, Bayan Muna Party-list Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate called on the SSS leadership to take steps to freeze the bank accounts of the four implicated officials and sequester their stocks to add to the state pension fund’s coffers.

“Do not just file charges and prosecute these people. SSS must move to immediately freeze all banks/financial accounts and sequester stocks and assets and its proceeds in favor of the SSS fund,” Zarate said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

The alleged malfeasance came to light amid SSS’s push to increase in January the rate of members’ contributions to 12.5 percent of the monthly salary credit, from the current 11 percent.

SSS’s bid to hike the employees’ contributions was intended to offset the increase in the pension of retired members, which supposedly shortened the fund life, which would now be spent by the year 2025 to 2028, from the original estimate of 2042.

Zarate said this anomaly meant that imposing additional contributions on ordinary employees would be “not only baseless but outright unjust and immoral.”

“This is truly infuriating considering that those in charge of increasing and improving the members’ fund life through prudent and high-return investments are instead the ones sabotaging it (using) the members’ fund.  It’s just criminally shameless for these people to even push for a contribution increase,” he said. /jpv