Joker ‘didn’t do pork’

AN email sent to this section doubted the reputation of Joker Arroyo never having touched the pork barrel that each senator used to get. Aside from the annual P200 million for every member of the Senate, they would occasionally get releases from the PDAF, congressional pork, or DAP, presidential pork.

“Joker, may he rest in peace, was reported to have been allocated P47 million from DAP. How could he not have benefited from it?” the mail read.

On July 14, 2014, Joker clarified that the said P47 million was never released, at least not to him. Arroyo deplored the lack of accounting from DBM: it didn’t account for the P47 million he was supposed to have received or for the rest of the P150 billion released from the president’s pork.

Earlier, on Jan. 11, 2013, he also belied that he received P1.6 million Christmas bonus from then Senate president Juan Ponce Enrile. At the time, he acknowledged that colleagues called him the “Scrooge of Congress”: he was, as he himself put it, “the thriftiest, most frugal and tight-fisted” legislator in his 12-year stint as senator.