MANILA, 27 July 2003 — Presidential aspirant Raul Roco has been charged before the Ombudsman with the indiscriminate hiring of legal consultants when he was head of the Department of Education (DepEd).
“Concerned private citizens” Dr. Edgar Daguimol and Alberto de Vera alleged in the case that Roco hired his former business partners as consultants of the department and gave them exorbitant pay, to the disadvantage of the Philippine government.
Roco was not immediately available for comment but former education undersecretary Ernesto Pangan, now the administrative officer at Roco’s Aksyon Demokratiko political party, told Arab News not all of the nine legal consultants of the DepEd were from Roco’s former law office, the Roco-Kapunan-Megallos law firm.
“There were a couple from the law office and their appointments were all cleared and approved by Solicitor General Simeon Marcelo,” Pangan said.
He also made it clear that Roco had cut all ties with the law office the moment he assumed a Cabinet position.
Pangan said the DepEd union, led by its president Fidel Salosagcol, had also filed with the Ombudsman charges against Roco, which had been rehashed as they were previously filed with the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC) and were never acted upon.“The acts of Raul S. Roco as secretary of education were honest and devoid of corruption,” said Pangan, who was included in the union’s complaint.
He said the charges could be considered since Roco had resigned from the Arroyo Cabinet immediately upon the endorsement of the graft charges to the PAGC.
The union complaint cited three counts of graft against Roco, including the alleged unlawful use of a helicopter when he was education secretary, ordering the printing of 350,000 posters bearing his image at a cost of 1.14 million pesos without a public bidding, and alleged failure to “seasonably remit” to the Bureau of Treasury 74,814 pesos in service fee collections in September 2001, in violation of government auditing regulations.The union described Roco’s use of a helicopter as a waste of government funds.
and particularly cited Roco’s use of a chartered Cebu Air helicopter when he inspected schools in Mountain Province and Benguet province in October 2001.
However, Pangan said the onetime use of the helicopter was the most efficient and effective means of visiting the Third Elementary Education Project in the Cordilleras and was funded by the World Bank.
Pangan also said the printing and distribution of the posters were upon the orders of the president. They were budgeted for and were bought at the least cost after a bidding process where even the Department of Budget Management (DBM) participated.
“The charges filed by the DepEd union are false and baseless. They repeat allegations submitted to and investigated by the Presidential Anti Graft Commission which has not been acted on by the president in the last eleven months,” Pangan said.
Pangan explained that the PAGC could have recommended that the case be transferred to the Ombudsman since it was administrative in nature and then Secretary Roco had resigned.
The rehashing of the charges against Roco were apparently made to get him to withdraw from the 2004 presidential race, especially in light of numerous surveys naming him as the leading candidate.
Pangan said there have been a lot of letters written about alleged graft charges against Roco but these have not been substantiated in court.
