A NEW BUZZWORD known only by the former higher-ups of the Department of Public Works and Highways, is ALLOCABLE funds — first bared to the public at the hearing of the Blue Ribbon Committee chaired by Sen. Panfilo Lacson.
Upon hearing this buzzword, the first thing that came to my mind is alukable — meaning offered (with conditions) funds— a name coined by ex-DPWH Secretary Manuel Bonoan (someone I thought I respected coming from the private sector) and executed by Undersecretary Ma. Catalina E. Cabral of Planning and PPP, previously a highly-recognized model of “Women in Infrastructure.” Her image was that of a trustworthy civil servant, dedicated to her career.
In the confession before the BRC by resigned DPWH Undersecretary Roberto Bernardo he said that there was no clear formula on how the allocable funds are computed. More often, he said, Cabral tells him that all the allocable funds have already been allocated in the National Expenditure Program, when in reality Cabral sets aside some funds for herself and Bonoan.
Bernardo himself carried an awesome demeanor, at least among DPWH people and the contractors. He was the real boss of district engineers Henry Alcantara and Bryce Hernandez, who turned out to be the messengers of “papers and funds” of kickbacks to be given to the legislators and industry allies.
‘We must end corruption, which is rooted in political dynasties and patronage politics, and the practice of SOPs and kickbacks. These practices have made our rich country poorer by the year making us lag miserably behind our poorer neighbors — Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos.’
NEVER HEARD
A video of Rappler’s interview with former congressman and ex-Budget Secretary Butch Abad showed that he never heard of the term “allocable” and what formula is used in partitioning these funds to intended recipients among LGUs. Being something new and opaque, no one but Cabral and Bonoan, have engineered and benefited from the allocable funds.
Abad, DBM Secretary under President “Noynoy” Aquino III, spearheaded major budget reforms like GAA-as-Release Document and Performance-based Budgeting and the highly-controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program, another term for pork barrel that was outlawed by the Supreme Court.
ANO INAALOK?
When Rappler interviewed one congressman, he surprisingly answered: ano inaalok? This response is a natural reaction by any Filipino.
Fantastic how people landing at the top positions are able to invent and reinvent pork barrel into different schemes and nomenclatures only to circumvent the final ruling of the Supreme Court that pork barrel is unconstitutional and illegal.
Not even during the time of the most corrupt president (post Martial Law) Rodrigo Duterte invented/engaged in allocable funds.
I wonder if this is the anointed money-making venture of Junior to ensure that his family would live well enough for the rest of their lives?
For how can we explain to the people that these top officials who have had good reputations in the past have been so corrupted to destroy the entire bureaucratic systems.
WHO’S CABRAL
As USec for Planning and Public-Private Partnership (PPP), Ma. Catalina Cabral oversaw DPWH’s infrastructure planning and programming and all PPP projects of DPWH, A licensed engineer with two doctorate degrees in Business Management and Public Administration and has a Ph.D. candidate in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of the Philippines. She also holds three master’s degrees and certificates from Wharton, Harvard Kennedy School, and Mohamed Bin Zayed University in areas like data analytics, digital
transformation, and AI.
She made history as the first female President of the Philippine Institute of Civil Engineers (PICE) and later served as National President of the Road EngineeringAssociation of the Philippines. In 2021, she held the Professional Chair in Engineering Science and Technology at PUP.
Her excellence has earned her numerous awards, including the 2021 PEZA Galing Pinas Ecozone Partnership Award, the 2020 Excellence Award from the Philippine Federations of Professional Associations, and the 2021 PRC Outstanding Additionally, the JCI Senate Philippines named her one of the Five Outstanding Filipino (TOFIL) Awardees Laureates for Government and Public Service in 2022. She also received in 2024 the Circle of Excellence ASIA-CEO Women of the Year.
Cabral has been nominated for several international awards, including the World Federation of Engineering Organization’s GREE Women in Engineering Award in 2019, the United Nations Public Service Awards for SDG 5 – Gender and Equality in 2022, the Asian Civil Engineering Coordinating Council (ACECC) Achievement Award in 2022. She has also recently been
nominated for the 2024 Women’s International Network on Disaster Risk Reduction (WIN-DRR) and the Presidential GAWAD CES Award.
WHO’S ROBERTO BERNARDO
No less than Sen. Ping Lacson, BRC chair, described USec Bernardo as “the powerful padrino of Henry Alcantara and Brice Hernandez, DPWH engineers now on the hot seat of the ongoing flood control mess.”
Bernardo was among the DPWH executives whom the Discayas earlier mentioned as among those involved in the web of corruption — supposedly soliciting money from contractors like them after securing the projects.
In his privilege speech, Lacson linked Bernardo and Bonoan to a contractor of flood control projects in Bulacan — MBB Global Properties Corp., of which the children of Bernardo and Bonoan are among the owners.
As USec for regional operations in the Visayas, NCR and Region IV-B, he had supervision and control of all infrastructure projects. He has the most to explain how these substandard, ghost or overpriced projects happened under his watch, whether or not his boys went rogue or if he himself had any involvement.
Star business editor Iris Gonzales said rumors say Bernardo may have already left the country last November even as DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon earlier requested the issuance of an immigration lookout bulletin order on contractors and DPWH officials, including Bernardo.
Bernardo, a long-time veteran at DPWH, might be the missing link between his two men, Alcantara and Hernandez, and perhaps the rest of the BGC Boys in DPWH and the politicians who were involved in this dizzying corruption saga.
He rose from the ranks in DPWH with 30 years of work experience to boot. He started as a civil engineering aide in 1986.
Bernardo received the prestigious Most Outstanding Alumnus Award for Government Service from the Mapua Institute of Technology, the institution where he completed his Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering in 1984.
OTHER SCANDAL PLAYERS
The DPWH bigwigs and contractors, on their own, cannot create pork. The pork is built around the budget– either through unprogrammed funds where insertions from the budget can fund imagined or real projects.
In other words, the bigger players are those in the legislature and the palace– where budgets are first proposed, expounded/propounded and funds can be diverted from priority programs and projects to this item of unprogrammed funds.
It takes both chambers to toy with the budget—taxpayers’ money— which they play with as if they owned the funds in the first place.
Using the bicam and the special (secret) committee, they insert their projects for funding– and usually they already have clear ideas of where and which contractor to allocate them to, of course with the usual SOP (standard operating procedure or commonly known as kickbacks).
This corrupt practice has been with us since the Chinese traded with us, then the Spanish, Japanese and Americans “gifted” us with progress-cum-corruption and now our legislators have fine-tuned them into so many forms, formats and names.
We must end corruption, which is rooted in political dynasties and patronage politics, and the practice of SOPs and kickbacks. These practices have made our rich country poorer by the year making us lag miserably behind our poorer neighbors — Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos.