Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV is claiming that Rodrigo Duterte has been running an army of “ghost employees” during his term as Davao City mayor from the late 1980s to the present.
Trillanes said Duterte’s ghost employee army was uncovered only in 2015 by the Commission on Audit when it questioned Duterte’s hiring of 11,000 contractual primarily on his recommendation.
“These conditions cast doubt that entries in the daily time record of these employees are manipulated, thus regularity and validity of the related expenditures could not be ascertained,” said COA.
COPA revealed that the government paid P708 million in salaries to the 11,000 employees in 2014 alone but Trillanes believed that the scheme has been going on since Duterte’s first term as mayor in 1988.
“This anomalous practice of Davao City of hiring thousands upon thousands of contractual workers under his and his daughter’s incumbency have been going on for years if not for decades,” said Trillanes.
Duterte, however, has blamed the ghost employee scam to a one-term Davao City mayor,Benjamin De Guzman, who served from 1998 to 2001.
“The mayor before me did it. De Guzman did it. Why only now? Wala akong ginawa, basta ang pera dumaan sa ganito. If I can produce one worker of the 11,000 magsasabi na may piso dumating sa akin, magre-resign na ako bukas, at magpapakulong ako,” said Duterte.
Trillanes found Duterte’s explanation “preposterous” because in the last 30 years,Davao City was ruled by Duterte himself or his daughter, Sara, Which showed “that they cannot escape responsibility for the said anomaly.”
In his affidavit filed before the Office of the Ombudsman,Trillanes said Duterte should be charged with malversation of public funds and plunder for hiring of ghost employees.
Trillanes claimed that the funds for ghost employees was the source of Duterte’s ill-gotten wealth in his undisclosed bank accounts.
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