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MANILA – Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano and his wife, Taguig Representative Lani Cayetano, flew to the city of Davao over the weekend to meet with Vice President Paolo Duterte and the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Eric Go Yap.
This as rumors of a coup against Cayetano persist in the run-up to the scheduled application of the shared term agreement between Cayetano and Marinduque representative Lord Allan Velasco in the last quarter of 2020.
But Yap told ABS-CBN News it was just a social call and nothing about the job was discussed.
Paolo, one of President Rodrigo Duterte’s sons, mocked him the other week with his controversial text message in which he threatened that the Mindanao congressional bloc would declare vocations and vice presidencies vacant last Monday, a move that never it happened.
The day before, he issued a statement clarifying that he will stay out of the budget and speech discussions, noting that anything he says or does can be reflected in his father.
“I respectfully told you that I didn’t want to get involved. The text message that I sent to another legislator, and which is now circulating, was an expression of my personal dismay at hearing the concerns of my fellow legislators, “he said.
“Now that Congress continues to be haunted by the budget issue, something that comes down to the current House leadership, how it treats its members, how it approves appropriations and budgets with or without equity, let me reiterate my position.
“I don’t want to get involved, however, I want to help my fellow legislators find answers to their questions or remedies to the budget they proposed for their people.”
The representative of the third district of Negros Oriental, Arnolfo Teves, previously raised the issue of the allocation of funds for projects by district and pointed out that the territory of Cayetano, Taguig, and the home province of Villafuerte, Camarines Sur, received approximately P8 billion and P11 billion in the 2021 budget, respectively.
Meanwhile, Yap said that some of these were 2020 projects that were suspended because the funds had to be used for the pandemic response. Instead, these projects were included in the 2021 budget.
Yap said this is the case with Taguig.
“Taguig is mostly FLR (for later release), so they can’t be called new projects. Those are last year’s projects that instead of going to this year 2020, they just happened to get FLR in 2021. If you look. Taguig’s new projects are not so big, especially the camps, the bases are all loaded, ”he said.
(In the case of Taguig, many of them were ‘for later publication’, so it cannot be said that they are new projects. Those were projects last year, but instead of being implemented this year 2020, what happened was that like FLR in 2021. If you look at the new projects in Taguig, the amount is not that big, especially the camps, the bases will take them)
On Wednesday, during the interpellation of Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Zarate, Public Works Usec. Maria Catalina Cabral said that the total amount for all projects marked “For Later Publication” in 2020 amounted to P271 billion. Half of these will be funded this year and the rest will be funded next year.
However, Zárate pointed out that there seemed to be an inconsistency because the Department of Budget and Management also reported that it had already published 92.3 percent of the 2020 Budget.
“In June 2020, the DBM said that it had already released 92.3 percent of our national budget for 2020. So, ibig sabihin ba nito, na despite this pandemic, what is the project that you propose for 2020? Nai-release naman yung budget at gumana? (So does this mean that despite this pandemic, all of the proposed 2020 projects had their budgets published? ”He said.
Public Works Sec. Mark Villar said that “regarding the FLR there is still a part of that that needs to be published.”
“Of course, I cannot comment directly on the DBM numbers,” he said.
House of Representatives, House Leadership, House Speaker, Alan Peter Cayetano, Lani Cayetano, Paolo Duterte, Eric Go Yap, Lord Allan Velasco, Shared Term Agreement.
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