LINGAYEN, Pangasinan, Aug. 14 (PNA)–Over 2,000 farmers from the town of Alcala, Pangasinan got the surprise of their lives when their leaders received last week a letter from the Commission on Audit (COA) asking them if they received cash aid of Php 37,800 and farm implements drawn from the Malampaya funds.
“Suddenly, we received a letter from COA asking us if we received that big amount,” said tobacco farmer Ruben Lagmay, president of the Northern and Central Luzon Tobacco Farmers Association, in an interview.
“We never received any money nor got the knapsack sprayers and other farm tools that COA was asking,” added Lagmay.
He said their names were listed as among the beneficiaries of the cash aid but the signatures appearing therein were not theirs, he added.
If totaled the money that was supposed to be handed over to them would have been at least Php 75 million and would have been sufficient enough as capital in one cropping of rice, corn or tobacco.
The first batch of missing Malampaya funds was first reported as part of the scam engineered by Janet Napoles.
According to a lawyer consulted by the farmers, the missing fund that COA was trying to locate was reportedly released to the group of farmers in 2012 or already during the Aquino administration.
What has been dubbed as the Malampaya funds, is the yearly share of the Philippine government from yearly net profits from the Malampaya gas project off Palawan, which are sold as fuel to run natural gas fed power plants in Batangas.
The gas deposit was a discovery made by an oil exploration consortium led by Shell Exploration Philippines, a subsidiary of the Dutch oil conglomerate, Shell Corp.
In the first year, the government got its share of the profits in 1996, which was a hefty Php 3 billion. That share has been increasing ever since.
Previously, the Malampaya funds were dedicated to fund livelihood programs for agrarian reform beneficiaries under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP.
Lagmay likened the ghost delivery of Malampaya funds to the promise of funding projects for tobacco farmers out of the multi-million peso excises tax on tobacco that never benefited them.
He complained that he tried to get his late harvest of corn dried at the grains drying facility in his town reportedly built with tobacco tax funds.
His 100-bag wet corn was rejected by the drying facility management for being too little in volume.
He, however said he saw middlemen and two town councilors getting their yellow grits processed in the drying facility (PNA)