Senate must convene ethics body to hear complaints

Chiz: Senate must convene ethics body to hear complaints

SEN. FRANCIS Escudero yesterday said there shouldn’t be too much quibbling over whether senators’ fund allocations from the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) were linked to the May 2012 conviction of Chief Justice Renato Corona.

But he agreed that it was about time the Senate ethics committee was convened to hear complaints against senators over any matter, including the pork barrel scam.

Escudero said even Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, who exposed the DAP allocations for senators in a September 2013 privilege speech, admitted that he voted for Corona’s conviction despite the allocation.

“If the accuser himself said he voted on evidence, what makes him different from us who also received such allocations?” Escudero said over dzBB. “If the accuser wasn’t affected, why would the rest be affected?”

Escudero said the DAP—an impounding mechanism supposedly for government savings whose constitutionality has been questioned in the Supreme Court—was a program that wasn’t properly explained. He claimed this was aboveboard and should not be linked to the Corona trial.

“Corona admitted that he did not declare something in his SALN. The only question was, was this impeachable or not?” he said.

In his speech, Estrada said that senators, including him, were allotted an additional pork barrel of at least P50 million months after the Senate convicted Corona.

Budget Secretary Florencio Abad confirmed that 20 senators received additional pork barrel amounting to P1.107 billion after Corona’s trial and that the fund was sourced from the DAP, introduced in 2011 to “ramp up spending.”

Estrada said it wasn’t a bribe but called it an “incentive” for voting to oust Corona for dishonesty in his statements of assets, liabilities and net worth.

Budget officials recently confirmed that some P370 million from the DAP was released to Estrada, Ramon Revilla Jr., Vicente Sotto III and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. midway through the Corona trial inMarch 2012.

They explained that the amount was initially released to the Department of Agrarian Reform in December 2011, when the House impeached Corona.

But the four senators later requested that the funds be realigned to National Livelihood Development Corp. (NLDC), which released the funds to the chosen foundations of the four in March 2012.