2nd impeach rap vs Marcos will come from Bayan
The militant coalition Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) is set to file today a second impeachment complaint against President Marcos for betrayal of public trust in relation to the issues raised over the national budget and the multibillion-peso public works corruption scandal.
Bayan president Renato Reyes Jr. on Wednesday said the complaint would be endorsed by the three-member Makabayan bloc composed of ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio, Gabriela Rep. Sarah Elago, and Kabataan Rep. Renee Co.
Time is of the essence for the second complaint as House secretary general Cheloy Garafil confirmed that the first complaint filed by lawyer Andre de Jesus last week had been transmitted to the Speaker’s office as of Wednesday.
Once it is referred to the House committee on justice and therefore deemed initiated under the first mode of initiating impeachment complaints, any subsequent complaint will be covered by the one-year ban.
Reyes said he expected their verified complaint to be “transmitted to the Speaker and included in the order of business, and not be excluded in favor of what many are saying is a weak first complaint intended to shield the President.”
The Bayan complaint will cite betrayal of public trust as ground for impeachment and will be based on, among others, the “systematic and large-scale plunder of public funds through a scheme of presidential and congressional ‘allocations’ for pet projects in the national budget.”
The coalition is referring to allegations made by former House appropriations committee chair and resigned Ako Bicol Rep. Elizaldy Co that Mr. Marcos and his allies had been inserting projects at all stages of the budget preparation in exchange for kickbacks.
Budget determination
The alleged insertions were done through the so-called “allocables formula” devised by the late former Public Works Undersecretary Maria Catalina Cabral. Officially called the Baselined-Balanced-Managed (BBM) Parametric Formula, it was used in crafting the budgets of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) from 2022 to 2026.
The formula was supposed to help set infrastructure funding allocations for legislative districts and was spelled out in a 16-page document prepared by Cabral in July 2022.
As noted by the Makabayan lawmakers last week in their analysis of the “Cabral formula,” it was used by the DPWH to prepare its draft budget from 2023 up to the recently enacted 2026 General Appropriations Act.
It was also presented in three stages, as suggested by the formula’s name:
1. “Baselined”–sets a minimum allocation using six years of historical data such as previous infrastructure allocations, population, and land area.
2. “Balanced”–adjustments for poverty incidence, infrastructure density, climate vulnerability, and the legislative district’s absorptive capacity or efficiency implementing projects.
3. “Managed”–adjustments are made to the mathematically derived allocation determined in the first two stages, based on “higher considerations.”
‘Smoking gun’
It is at the third stage where “technical results” are overridden by external factors that can be interpreted to be patronage, the Makabayan bloc said.
They cited Page 6 of the document, which read in part: “…considering that the national budget is an economic, political, and legal tool of the national government all at the same time, the DPWH BBM Allocation Formula should be able to take into account higher considerations in decision-making, beyond engineering and economic development of DPWH. Priorities of the leaders of the national government and the legislature will also be considered in this matter.”
This admission, the bloc argued, “is the smoking gun… The language used is a telling giveaway. It explicitly names ‘priorities of the leaders’ instead of “priorities of the administration’—meaning individual officials, not institutional mandates.”
The lawmakers said this basically proved that the formula was “pork barrel by design” and that testimonies made by whistleblowers in past congressional inquiries “should therefore be seen in this light.”
“The alleged submissions of project proposals by the President, Cabinet officials, as well as leaders of the House and Senate are not anomalous interventions but routine implementations of the policy,” they claimed.
‘Unprogrammed’ funds
The complaint is also expected to cite the “unprecedented abuse of unprogrammed appropriations.”
“The system of ‘allocables’ and unprogrammed appropriations remains to this day,” Reyes said. “These only demonstrate the President’s complicity in corruption.”
Apart from Bayan’s allied groups, Reyes said the complainants will include taxpayers, workers, farmers, students, teachers, urban poor, professionals and anticorruption advocates.
Meanwhile, Sen. Risa Hontiveros on Wednesday raised the possibility that the Senate would hold two separate impeachment trials—one for President Marcos and the other for Vice President Sara Duterte—should the respective complaints against them get the needed votes and be transmitted by the House. —WITH A REPORT FROM TINA G. SANTOS
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