Palace admits GMA’s budget disbursements legal

Passes off Noy’s misleading claims as Arroyo’s ‘lack of prudence’

Are their faces red, but they are still trying to save face by injecting a morality issue.

Malacañang yesterday admitted that there was nothing anomalous after all in President Aquino’s claimed “shock and awe” expose against his predecessor, former President now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Arroyo, with her budget appropriations and expenditures when she was still the Chief Executive, as all these have all been accounted for by the 14th Congress.

This was the admission issued yesterday by Department of Budget and Management (DBM) Undersecretary Mario Relampagos who served as presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda’s guest of the day at a Malacañang press conference, for him to provide explanations in light of House Minority Leader Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman’s contra-Sona statements last Tuesday.

Neither truth nor facts “exposed” could be found

in Aquino’s maiden State of the Nation Address, as the speech was both “defective in what it said” and “deficient in what it failed to say,”Edcel Lagman said as he delivered a contra-Sona.

Lagman pointed out that the minority criticized the Sona as a means by which to tell Aquino that the figures and other information that he had stated in his speech were both wrong and misleading.

But the Palace wasn’t quite ready to admit that the claims of Aquino were wrong, as Relampagos explained that which Aquino was trying to convey when he issued his so-called exposes against the previous administration was the former President’s “lack of prudence” in apportioning the 2010 budget, given the tight fiscal situation of the country.

He said that from January to June this year, the country overshot its deficit target by P51-B which was caused by a revenue shortfall of about P23-B thus exceeding its spending by P27-B.

Relampagos categorically stated that legally he cannot cite anything anomalous with the way the budget has been processed and managed by the previous administration since everything has been accounted for including the P62.1-B congressional initiatives.

Asked what he had understood by the President’s accusations that the previous administration squandered the funds of the government because it has left him “wiggle room” of just P100-B, Relampagos said Aquino may just have been referring to the “imbalance” in the pattern of spending by the government.

Lacierda for his part said that while there was nothing illegal in the releases made by the previous administration, questions on propriety or delicadeza surfaced given the contentious P108-M calamity fund allocation intended for Arroyo’s district in Pampanga which, as explained by the former President’s camp, can still be held by Aquino.

Lacierda insisted it was fiscally irresponsible for the Arroyo government to allocate so much for the Pampanga district.

“It is really fiscally irresponsible for them to do that (budget releases). We have a deficit and they were saying it is manageable. But the fact is, if you are fiscally prudent in managing the economy, we would have a lesser budget deficit,” he said when asked if Aquino had been unfair to his predecessor, given the fact that no anomaly was committed by Arroyo and her officials in terms of the budget process.

Aquino will have an even bigger budget deficit in the next six months, as his finance chief has announced that the Aquino government will be borrowing over P760 billion this year.

In a criticism-filled Sona issued by Aquino last Monday, he implied that Arroyo had squandered the P1.54-T national budget under her term by way of making midnight allocations thus leaving a measly P100-B “wiggle room” to fund his administration’s programs.

DBM Secretary Florencio ‘Butch’ Abad the other day, however, tried to shed light on this accusation, correcting the substance of Aquino’s message as received by the public that created the confusion.

“It is not correct to say that that (P100-B) is only what is left, you know, because as you will look in the release, out of the P1.54-T budget for 2010, P949.2 or about 61 percent, a little over 61 percent had already been released. In the language of DBM, there is a difference between released, meaning authority to enter into an obligation and obligating or getting into a contract itself,” Abad said.

In attempt to save Malacañang’s defenses from collapsing in light of Lagman’s statement that Aquino is grossly misinformed by his officials given the misleading facts and figures that they fed him, Lacierda resorted to claiming that the lawmaker had cited a different data source by way of explaining the discrepancies, even when the same data were adverted to.

Abad’s claim was echoed by Communications Group operations unit chief, Secretary Herminio ‘”Sonny” Coloma who stressed that Aquino was not fed with wrong information by his Cabinet secretaries when they submitted their reports which served as his basis in determining the lay of the land.

“There’s a feeling that this (Arroyo’s approach in the 2010 budget) was not (within) the parameters of good governance. It was somehow breached. It may not be patently illegal but it’s an issue of how you manage resources judiciously,” Coloma told reporters in a late afternoon post-briefing interview.

Coloma claimed that Aquino is not the type of person who would allow himself to be given unverified reports for he is naturally keen on details and accuracy.

National Food Authority (NFA) administrator Lito Banayo, however, was quoted saying the other day that the supposed rice importation irregularity that he has found in his department which he reported to Aquino and was also included in the Sona was still in the process of investigation.

Banayo even kept reporters groping for clues as to what was the exact volume of the alleged over-imported rice and where are they being kept.

Coloma provided explanations behind Aquino’s failure to present a clear roadmap to where he plans to take the country under his six years of presidency.

Asked why the President fell short in presenting concrete solutions to the problems that he supposedly inherited from the previous administration, Coloma said Aquino had apparently decided to forego the statistics as these would prolong his speech.

“Let us try to look at the situation: he (Aquino) was able to deliver it (Sona) in 35 minutes, right? If he would fill it with statistics and performance indicators for each of the 25 Cabinet departments, it might not fit even within two hours,” he said.

Coloma further tried to dispel criticisms that Aquino focused only on the irregularities of the previous administration, claiming that he never intended to earn public’s trust at the expense of Arroyo’s so-called sins.

“It was just incidental that some personalities were mentioned there because you are trying to state the truth. It just so happens that they (officials from the previous administration) are implicated therein. The primary purpose is not to malign or to put people in a bad light but to depict the truth as it really is,” he said.

Coloma also mentioned that there are still other available avenues where Aquino may present more concrete solutions to the pressing issues that the country is facing today insofar as agrarian reform, jobs generation, human rights, corruption, and other agenda are concerned.

“We do not have just one opportunity (to address other concerns) because governance is continuing. He (Aquino) just used his judgment instead of diluting it (Sona) with so many statistics, with so many figures. He, as a communicator, decided that there was a better way to convey that message which does not lead to a conclusion that there were no targets,” he stressed.

“Before you can even set a target, you have to determine first the concrete situation in the department and this is the reason why the first step was really to get an assessment for each secretary. If the process of assessment is done, then we know where we are and when we know where we are, we have a better sense of where we will be going. We cannot set out target if we are still uncertain about where we are,” Coloma added.

The incoming communications men of Aquino said they see no need for contriving a new public image for him as he will be projected simply as who he is and on the basis of his announced visions for the Filipino people.

Recently resigned television news anchor Ricky Carandang who is likely to assume the messaging functions of the new Palace communications group said that even with the complex nature of the presidential communications and the growing sophistication of the media, they will not employ deliberate means to unduly enhance the President and his administration.

“No spin, no manufacture and no fabrication,” said Carandang on the kind of information the media will expect from Malacañang and the executive arm of government.

Coloma said the President will be projected with authenticity and with genuineness, taking into account the spontaneity of the people’s awareness and reactions to him. –Aytch S. de la Cruz, Daily Tribune