Alcala farmers deny getting P75-M in Malampaya funds
OVER 2,000 farmers in the town of Alcala got the surprise of their lives when their leaders suddenly received last week a letter from the Commission on Audit (COA) verifying if they received cash aid of P37,800 and farm implements drawn from the Malampaya funds.
“Bigla na lang kaming nakatanggap ng sulat galing sa COA na mayroon daw kaming natanggap na ganung pera,” revealed tobacco farmer Ruben Lagmay, president of the Northern and Central Luzon Tobacco Farmers Association in a radio interview.
Transcript of said interview was obtained by The Punch.
“We never received any money nor get the knapsack sprayers and other farm tools COA was asking,” added the farmer leader.
Their names were listed among the beneficiaries of the cash aid but the signatures were not theirs, he added.
The money that was supposed to have been given them would have totaled at least P75 million.
The first batch of missing Malampaya funds was first reported as part of the scam engineered by now widely known PDAP scam queen 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.
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.
When the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program was not yet phased out, the Malampaya funds were dedicated to fund livelihood programs for agrarian reform beneficiaries.
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. (Leonardo Micua)
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