JEDDAH, 26 May — Honorio “Noor” Salas Perez, the person whose petition is being used as basis for the transfer of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) to another department, is a “big fraud.”
This statement comes from a renowned Filipino community leader in the Kingdom, who claimed that Perez left behind a trail of lies and deception in his four years working in the western city of Yanbu, to the embarrassment of his compatriots.
“He should be exposed before he does more damage to the good name of OFWs,” said Raffy David, an engineer who heads the Filipino Community in Yanbu (Filcoyan) and a Bagong Bayani awardee in 1999 for community service.
David exposed Perez in a letter e-mailed to concerned Philippine officials and other community leaders in Saudi Arabia.
“Here in Yanbu, Perez earned the moniker of tale-spinner because of his weird ideas and being a congenital liar,” he also said in an earlier letter to officials at the Philippine Consulate in Jeddah.
Perez’s name cropped up in the news last week as an offshoot of OWWA Administrator Wilhelmn Soriano’s announcement that he wanted the agency transferred to the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) to make it more effective.
Amid charges that he was trying to undercut Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas’ attempt to institute reforms at the OWWA, Soriano said he was only responding to the “clamor” of overseas Filipino groups. He cited such groups as the Global Alliance of OFWs, the OFW-Unifil, and other nongovernmental groups such as the militant Migrante International.
The “clamor” was in the form of a petition by a group calling itself OFWs Alliances (Overseas), which carried the name of Noor Perez as chairman and spokesman.
The petition was sent to President Gloria Arroyo during Labor Day, May 1, asking that the OWWA be transferred to the DFA since Philippine missions abroad are headed by ambassadors and consuls anyway.
It turned out, however, that the signatures appended to the petition were gathered by advocacy groups such as Kakammpi earlier this year in support of the absentee voting bill. Kakammpi officials said the signatures were misused without their knowledge.
According to Raffy David, while he agrees with some of the reasons raised by the petition in seeking the transfer of the OWWA away from the Department of Labor and Employment, “I am afraid that he (Perez) has a hidden agenda behind it.”
David said he was not surprised with Perez getting involved in scams because of his misdeeds in Yanbu, an industrial center in western Saudi Arabia.
“I should know because he did it many times here in Yanbu,” he said.
According to David, Perez worked with Arabian Industries Fibers Co. (Ibn Rushd) since 1996 until his forced resignation on July 21, 1999 because of complaints from his co-workers (OFWs, Indians and Pakistanis) and Yanbu OFWs of “unpaid IOUs” and for using company facilities for his personal use.
The following were among Perez’s major misdeeds in Yanbu, according to David:
• Soliciting donations for the death of his mother twice, first on December 1997 and again on May 1998, altering receipts to cover up deceit.
• Solicited donations for the repatriation of his brother Justino Perez (a victim of illegal recruitment) from Riyadh on March 1998, only to be found that he had used the money to buy a wide screen television.
• Distributed flyers appealing for cash donations to Saudi nationals in Yanbu on the day he was terminated from work in July 21, 1999 supposedly to start full-time dawah (Islamic propagation) activities in the Philippines. David noted that Perez, a convert to Islam, used his Muslim name Muhammad Noor Salas Perez in the solicitation for donations. Yet in an article he submitted to the Philippine Daily Inquirer Interactive upon his arrival in Manila, he dropped his Muslim name.
Fortunately, David said, Filcoyan members managed to alert potential donors of another scam in the making.
Perez, who worked as an executive secretary for his company, also had misrepresented himself wherever he went.
A copy shown to Arab News of Perez’s 13-page biodata showed a list of his qualification and job summary, which appeared to have been taken from an action plan and job description for his bosses. The biodata listed him as having placed No. 7 in the Philippine Board of Economists, which is said to be non-existent.
In Perez’s attempt to put everything he could imagine in his biodata, according to David, he forgot to note that he was ever born. His birth daye was not in the biodata.
David said that on June 18, 1999, during the awarding ceremonies of the Jeddah-based group Kasapi, Perez introduced himself to then Labor Attaché Abraham Malli as a representive of The Filipino Channel and also of Hoy Gising!, both of ABS-CBN network, namedropping Charo Santos of ABS-CBN as his classmate.
Perez also reportredly boasted to Consul Imelda Panolong in March 1998 that he was, among other things, the scriptwriter of the movie Flor Contemplacion and co-directed the movie with Joel Lamangan.
On August 18, 1999, ex-OFW Perez contributed an article to the Inquirer online edition and claimed that he was the founding chairman of Kasapi.
Kasapi was founded in Jeddah in 1991 to help the Philippine Consulate take care of Filipinos displaced from the Eastern Region during the Gulf War. Arab News learned that the Kasapi founding chairman was Emy de Guzman, general manager of Sky Freight Forwarders. At that time, Perez was reportedly not even working in western Saudi Arabia.
In exposing Perez, David cautioned Philippine officials such as those in the OWWA to conduct background checks first before dealing with people claiming to speak for OFWs.
In a letter Consul General Kadatuan P. Usop and Labor Attaché Malli in Jeddah on August 30, 1999, David issued the same warning. “Your offices as the protector of the welfare of OFWs should find means to stop the tale-spinning of this man. If he is not stopped he might cause greater damage to OFWs in the Kingdom,” the letter warned.