MANILA: Vice-President Sara Duterte said the confidential funds allocated to the Department of Education (DepEd) were used to investigate alleged rampant corruption in the agency she previously headed, including the 2.9 billion peso deal for outdated and overpriced laptops.
But her statement during the Pandesal forum held at the Kamuning Bakery in Quezon City contradicted the DepEd’s claim last year that it was unaware of how Duterte spent the 112.5 million peso confidential funds for the agency in 2023.
Duterte had previously refused to say how the secret funds were used, as she pointed to the Commission on Audit (COA) as the agency authorised to disclose where the funds went.
“There were many reports of corruption inside the Department of Education, not just in the central office but also the regional offices,” she told reporters in the forum.
“So whenever there are reports, we will investigate, and one of those we investigated was the laptop (deal),” she added.
In March 2022, the COA flagged the DepEd, then under Secretary Leonor Briones, Duterte’s predecessor, for buying 2.4 billion peso worth of reportedly “outdated and pricey” laptops for teachers conducting online classes in 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But according to Duterte, their investigation found that the procurement of the overpriced laptops “did not happen” inside the DepEd, but within the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM).
“So not all the procurement documents are in the DepEd,” Duterte said. “What we could only do back then was to blacklist (companies).”
However, she said they also did not succeed in blacklisting the companies, and they ended up having to rely on the recommendations of the COA as well as the Senate blue ribbon committee, which investigated the matter.
The Senate probe, which ended in January 2023, said in its committee report that the laptops were overpriced by at least 979 million peso, with each valued at 58,300 peso.
In August 2023, then Ombudsman Samuel Martires ordered the suspension for six months without pay of several current and former officials of DepEd and PS-DBM for their role in the transaction. Briones was admonished, although she was not held liable. — Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN
