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MANILA (TO UPDATE) – Marinduque representative Lord Allan Velasco will take over as Speaker of the House of Representatives on October 14, according to a source from Velasco camp.
Velasco and the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alan Peter Cayetano, met with President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday night to end the issue of the Presidency.
Neither Malacañang nor the Cayetano camp have issued any confirmation or details of the meeting nor have they responded to ABS-CBN inquiries.
The same ABS-CBN source stated that it was the president who decided to enforce the agreement he negotiated last year.
At the end of Tuesday’s meeting, all parties agreed that Cayetano will make an announcement. The same source also said that Cayetano will make the announcement on Wednesday.
Under a previous shared-term agreement for the presidency last year, Cayetano leads the House for the first 15 months of the 18th Congress, while Velasco will assume leadership for the last 21 months.
That shared term agreement was negotiated by Duterte.
Son of the retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and now Governor of Marinduque, Presbitero Velasco, Lord Allan served as a provincial administrator before becoming a legislator. His mother and sister were also legislators in previous congresses. He has close ties to San Miguel Corporation CEO Ramon Ang, who served as a baptism mentor for his youngest daughter.
The president’s son, Davao City Representative Paolo Duterte, previously denied that he would call for a change in House leadership when approached by congressmen about his district’s appropriations under next year’s national spending plan.
At a budget hearing earlier this month, Negros Oriental Third District Representative Arnolfo Teves Jr. confronted Department of Public Works and Highways officials about rumors he heard that Taguig City and Camarines Sur ( CamSur) were getting the biggest slice of their budget pie. for next year.
The two districts of Taguig are led by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alan Peter Cayatano, and his wife Lani, while one of the CamSur districts is represented by LRay Villafuerte, a close ally of Cayetano. Villafurte’s son, Migz, is also the governor of CamSur.
Villafuerte called Teves a “rumor dealer” for raising concerns based on “rumors” and linked his accusation to an alleged plot about the Presidency of the Chamber, adding that he saw nothing wrong if his district and Cayetano’s get a higher infrastructure budget.
ACT-CIS party list representative Eric Go Yap, chairman of the House budget panel, said he also saw nothing anomalous if Taguig was supposed to get more than P11 billion in projects from DPWH.
In 2018, Duterte’s younger sister, the mayor of the city of Davao, Sara Duterte, was widely recognized for the removal of then-president Pantaleón Álvarez and his replacement by former president and then-representative of Pampanga Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
The change in leadership affected the enactment of the 2019 budget, which was delayed by 4 months due to disputes by lawmakers.
Congress will go into recess from October 17 to November 15. Cayetano’s leadership has ensured that the 2021 budget will be approved before the recess.
– with a report from RG Cruz, ABS-CBN News
