No graft case vs Iloilo’s ‘Roderick Paulate’

“Anyone in a position of power is either corrupt or assumed to be corrupt, and the assumption of corruption is as bad as the reality of it.”
--Stanley A. McChrystal

By Alex P. Vidal

NEW YORK CITY -- All over the Philippines, it’s not only Quezon City Councilor Roderick Paulate who is allegedly guilty of hiring “ghost employees” and pocketing their salaries.
Paulate and his driver and liaison officer Vicente Bajamunde, accused of pocketing salaries of “ghost employees” amounting to P1.109 million, have been formally charged by the Office of the Ombudsman.
They have posted a bail for their temporary liberty.
But there were “Roderick Paulates” in other cities and provinces in the Philippines who have not been indicted in court.
Either the cases against them were weak or their accusers have failed to produce substantial pieces of evidence to pin them down.
Or they decided to chicken out for fear of reprisal or lack of will and determination to pursue the truth and seek justice.
Some of them, after realizing they have no chance to wiggle out from the mess, decided not to run for reelection or opted to fly the coop.

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There was a sensational case in 2006 involving an Iloilo city councilor caught unprepared during a radio interview and admitted hiring a certain couple as “laborers.”
Unknown to the city councilor, reporters had already checked with the Sangguniang Panlungsod and discovered the couple she mentioned didn’t have the job orders.
To compound the matter, the couple personally complained to media their names were included in city councilor’s legislative payroll for October 1-15 indicating they each received P2,200.
They never received a single centavo, the couple protested.
They also denied they were the city councilor’s employees.
No case has been filed against the city councilor but the city councilor decided not to seek for reelection in the following year's local elections.
The city councilor, highly respected in the community and with excellent track record in the business sector, cried political harassment.
Since the accusers failed to file a formal case against the city councilor other than “besmirching” the city councilor’s reputation, most of the city councilor’s supporters believed the issue leveled against the city councilor was indeed politically motivated.
The city councilor’s detractors, however, believed otherwise.

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Also, nobody has been indicted in the alleged discovery of several “ghost employees” in the Iloilo City task force against illegal parking created in 2014.
It may be recalled that Councilor Plaridel Nava of the city's transportation committee disclosed that under the supplemental budget, P212,000 had been allocated for the creation of a task force against illegal parking.
The councilor estimated at least 100 city employees were probably fictitious.
In this controversy, nobody was named as culprit and charged in the Office of the Ombudsman like Paulate.