Pork shop

Last Friday our topic was pork chop which is among the methods used by members of Congress to spread out the funds in their pork barrels to practically hide it under the maze of documents and a labyrinth of beneficiaries hidden in the dark recesses of the grafters’ minds.

To dispense the pork chops, the congressmen and the senators needed a pork shop – the Non-Government Organizations or NGOs and their own pet projects or even family foundations and corporations allegedly engaged in beneficial and humanitarian work.

Since these pork chops are tear-jerkers and bleeding hearts, who would dare question or investigate? Will you investigate an organization that is helping the poor with livelihood programs, medical and health care, feeding of famished children, training of housewives and out of school youth, rehabilitation of children in conflict with law, scholarships for the children of poor families – you can make a long list of these pork shops where the pork barrel funds go through.  

But alas and alack! So many crimes are being committed in the name of the poor who at the same time are voters and are crucial in every election because these people do not vote with their minds or convictions but with their heart – a sense of gratitude.

Nobody can quarrel with gratitude and so the pork shops are busy each day and more so as the elections approach.

A scandal however, has exploded in Manila where a pork shop is not a small one but a multi-billion scam because the shop is just a front for the diversion of funds into private pockets. The pork goes to someone somewhere and the Department of Justice wants to find out because the reported recipients claimed they never saw the pork or the pig.

Now another whistle blower has come out and maybe more will emerge to clear their conscience about the distribution of the pork chops and who owns the pork shops. More importantly we must know how these shops operate to skim the nation of money to grease solon’s pocket or use it for his political career.

I also mentioned the case of the local MKK which Monico Puentevella admitted in a press release from his office that appeared last Monday, that this program was from his congressional fund, meaning his pork barrel.

The MKK, the acronym for Monico Kabuhi Ko, is therefore the pork shop of Puentevella which he trumpets to have helped 65,000 people during his congressional tenure from 2001 to 2010. Nobody can question the noble intent of this program as I said earlier, but the question is not the beneficiary but the pork chops and how the pork shop operates.

For starter, is MKK a what? Is it a government program, a political party, a personal enterprise, a government agency?

It seems to be all of these rolled into one and maybe more which is not apparent at present but certain data are coming out, ironically from Puentevella’s camp which sends us to a specific direction of whose frying pan and table the pork chops end up.

From the July 15 press statement, the MKK is a government program which we can assume is directly under the then Congressman Puentevella.

If it is a government program, then the pork barrel funds must have been handled directly by his office. This also means that his office received the money from the DBM and then spent at his discretion or under some sort of policy guidelines.

The question arises: was the fund audited during the time that MKK was in operation? If the pork was handled by an NGO that NGO is accountable for the funds. Since it was Puentevella’s office, then MKK is accountable. Did at least MKK submit an accounting of its funds before it closed the pork shop in 2010 as the law requires of government offices?

Basic government rules and the law provide that an accounting be made. If there is such an accounting it behooves on Puentevella to release that to the people for whom the annual P70 million was supposed to be spent. For other beneficiaries or pork projects, the implementers must account.

MKK is different because the pork shop was directly managed by Puentevella.

I do not expect that Puentevella will issue such accounting because accounting of public funds is not one of his forte or inclination. He has not even accounted the P50.5 million BASOC funds until now.

So what do we do but to ask the DOJ to include MKK in its investigation? We must know since he is going to have MKK use city funds aside from MKK traffic enforcers.*

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