Signatories Origano, Keso, Lasaña, et al.

Mary Grace Piattos, Dodong Alcala, Dodong Bina, Dodong Bunal, Dodong Darong, Dodong S. Barok, Jay Kamote, Miggy Mango, Xiaome Ocho, Beverly Claire Pampano, Mico Harina, Sala Kasim, Patty Ting, Ralph Josh Bacon, Cannor Adrian Contis, Claire Nikka Lasaña, Kikoy Origano, Mathew Keso, Amoy Liu, Fernan Amuy, Joug de Asim, Renan Piatos, Pia Piatos-Lim, … and the list grows longer.

These are some of the “suspicious” names among the thousands of signatories who reportedly received confidential funds totaling P612.5 million from the Office of Vice President Sara Duterte and the Department of Education when she was education secretary. These names were submitted to the Commission on Audit. Suspicious because there are no records of them being Filipino citizens, that is, no birth, marriage, and death certificates of theirs can be found in the Philippine Statistics Authority. So, who are they? Where are they?

The name Mary Grace Piattos was the first to hit the news and the laugh-in departments because Mary Grace is the name of a famous and popular chain of restaurants, and Piattos (with a double t) is a popular brand of high-calorie crunchies (tsitsirya in Filipino) best enjoyed with an ice-cold drink while watching a whodunnit on TV or reading a page-turner. The unlikelihood that a person with that name actually exists was cause for LOL moments. The ones who fabricated that name and other suspicious names were so downright uncreative. Or so we thought. Why did they do it that way?

House Deputy Majority Leader and La Union Rep. Paolo Ortega V referred to the names as “team grocery” because they were derived from food items sold in grocery stores and markets. His question: If these are not real people, where did the funds go? But just as important, I think, whose idea was it to concoct such names?

In a news report, Ortega said that of the 1,992 individuals who signed as recipients of the confidential funds, 1,322 had no birth certificates; 1,456 had no marriage records; and 1,593 had no death records. Manila Rep. Joel Chua, chair of the House committee on good government and public accountability, said that 405 of 677 names listed as recipients of DepEd confidential funds had no birth records.

For not sufficiently and credibly explaining her use of confidential funds, the VP is facing impeachment, with impeachment articles already forwarded to the Senate, but the process will begin only in June, after the May elections. Petitions questioning the constitutionality of Duterte’s use of confidential and intelligence funds have also been filed before the Supreme Court.

The VP had explained, albeit not too convincingly, the haste to spend the P125 million in 11 days—for which she had been denounced—in order to comply with its being used before time was up, as required. But she did not explain how or why the funds were received by persons with such names. Did she even try to find out? There was reason for the public outcry.

For a brief moment, let me wear rose-colored glasses and say that perhaps there was a method in the way the crime—isn’t that a crime?—was committed, that whoever was tasked to fake those signatures did it on purpose in order to make the obvious look very obvious indeed. Why do some signatures look like they were written by one person? A handwriting expert can easily see that. Perhaps in their exasperation that they were being made to do a dirty job, they wanted it to look dirty indeed. A patriotic act? But there are consequences. So why not make a clean breast of it?

But without my rose-colored glasses, I say it was just plain laziness or boredom because they thought they could get away with it because no one would notice because their boss was above the law. I could have done a better job in the signature department, especially in signing in cursive writing, in different calligraphic strokes at that. Try me.

And so let the axe fall where it may.

This latest episode of irregularity is grist for jokers, punsters, caricaturists, and humorists. A comic relief. Someone volunteered—why not Islaw Kinilaw, Bruce Bulanglang, Francoise Laswa, Beth Pinakbet, and Colby Pinangat for a face-off with foreign flavors? We can go on and on to entertain ourselves and laugh at the ways of doing elementary magic with government funds sourced from taxpayers. But who has the last laugh?

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It was a privilege for me to attend a Zoom forum on “The International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Individual Accountability Norm in the Philippines: National and Regional Implications.” The guest speaker, former ICC judge and law dean Raul Pangalangan (former Inquirer publisher, too), spoke about the legal nuances in the “watershed event” that was the arrest of former president Rodrigo Duterte, who is facing charges of crimes against humanity and now detained at ICC’s Scheveningen Prison at The Hague in the Netherlands.

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