Names of alleged OVP fund recipients get curiouser

FILE PHOTO: Vice President Sara Duterte —GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

House Deputy Majority Leader Francisco Paolo Ortega V said on Sunday he has found seven more questionable names among the supposed recipients of the P500 million in confidential funds for the Office of the Vice President (OVP).

The newest members of what Ortega called the “Budol (Scam) Gang” were five “Dodongs:” Dodong Alcala, Dodong Bina, Dodong Bunal, Dodong Darong and Dodong S. Barok, as well as Jay Kamote and Miggy Mango.

“First there’s junk food and a cell phone. Now there’s a fruit and sweet potato. Above all, we seem to have a ‘Dodong Gang.’ Not just one or three, there are five of them in the list,” he said.

Ortega was referring to Mary Grace Piattos and Xiaome Ocho—other OVP confidential fund recipients whose names seemed to have been taken from a brand of chips and the Xiaomi Mi 8 cell phone. A request for verification from the House of Representatives with the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed there were no birth records for either.

Similarly, the five Dodongs, Kamote and Mango had no birth, marital or death records with the PSA, Ortega said.

The names were found on acknowledgment receipts submitted by the OVP to the Commission on Audit to justify its spending of P500 million in confidential funds from December 2022 to September 2023.

The PSA found that of the 1,992 names of confidential fund recipients, 1,322 had no birth records.

“What kind of payroll is this? Imaginary? We can’t tell if those who received the confidential funds were real people,” Ortega said in Filipino.

“This isn’t just negligence. This was a carefully made plan to squander public funds. The names were fake, the liquidation was fake and the liability was fake,” he added.

Ortega said the PSA’s certifications dated Dec. 8 and Dec. 11, 2024, further strengthened the case for impeachment against Vice President Sara Duterte, which was centered on the alleged misuse of P612.5 million in confidential fund allocations under the OVP and Department of Education when Duterte was its secretary.