Sunday, August 12, 2007 Ex-aide turns against Tony By Karlon N. Rama Sun.Star Staff Reporter
A FORMER member of Rep. Antonio Cuenco’s staff has surfaced to say that almost P3 million from the congressman’s Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) in 2004 went to “ghost purchases.”
James Yrastorza, who used to head the Cebu City south district congressman’s medical mission office at the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC), said that Wendell Villacin, owner of Dell Pharmacy and exclusive supplier of the medicines used in Cuenco’s P30-million medical program, facilitated the ghost purchases.
Yrastorza named two other alleged cohorts: a Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) examiner and a relative of the congressman.
The names are in an affidavit Yrastorza signed before Commission on Audit (COA) lawyers Federico Denapo and Clarence Joson on Aug. 31, 2005.
Yrastorza said he has been waiting almost two years to be summoned to testify on the affidavit, which stemmed from a COA investigation on the 2004 purchase. But no call came.
“I assumed that the matter had been swept under the rug but then I read the item in Sun.Star Cebu. I don’t claim to be an especially intelligent man but it was very apparent in the news reports that he intends to blame me for the anomaly,” Yrastorza, nephew of Regional Trial Court Judge Raphael Yrastorza, said in Cebuano.
Lie detector
Sun.Star Cebu tried calling the congressman’s cellular phone yesterday for his comment but it was off. Repeated calls to his personal secretary also went unanswered.
Lawyer Paul Clarence Oaminal, who is close to the congressman, said that Cuenco was in Manila since last week because an uncle died.
Yrastorza alleged that Cuenco contacted him after the report came out and assured that he’d take care of him and would even hire a lawyer for him.
But in a follow-up report ran by a Cebu City-based correspondent in a national broadsheet, Cuenco reportedly called him a saboteur of the medical program.
Yrastorza is offering to take a lie detector test before the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI).
The agency is looking into the incident and is trying to find a copy of the COA 2004 audit report that uncovered the alleged ghost purchases, as well as a consolidated version of the same report that was sent to the COA central office.
Pursuit
NBI 7 Director Medardo de Lemos said that Congressman Cuenco called him up only last Friday and asked to investigate the matter. A formal letter of request has not yet been submitted though.
Prior to the call, Cuenco told Sun.Star last Wednesday that he already called the NBI to “go after the culprit.”
“I’m going after the crooks and I don’t care who gets hurt,” he said in that interview.
He also revealed that he had known about the anomaly and the COA audit report, and that he had been coordinating and cooperating with the COA “to prosecute the people responsible.”
He identified those responsible as his former staff member-Yrastorza—and some VSMMC employees.
But Yrastorza yesterday said Cuenco knew what was going on from the start.
He said he reported the matter to Cuenco himself on May 29, 2004, a month before he resigned as a member of Cuenco’s staff.
2 years
“Some people at VSMMC had already begun getting suspicious. One doctor asked me about it and I pleaded with him to keep it quiet until after the elections because (congressional candidate Aristotle) Batuhan was also conducting a medical mission of his own at VSMMC and might use it during the campaign,” he said.
He said that Cuenco flatly told him he didn’t believe that Villacin, the BIR guy and the congressman’s relative could do such a thing.
Batuhan ran against Cuenco that year and lost.
Yrastorza told Sun.Star he began serving as Cuenco’s staff member in March 2002 until June 2004.
And in all that time, he was assigned to the congressman’s medical program at the VSMMC.
He had six staff members under him and reported to Cuenco’s relative, who sat as program chairman.
Villacin, who he said was Cuenco’s neighbor and a close friend of Cuenco’s relative who chaired the program, frequented the program field at VSMMC together with the BIR guy. However, they were part of the staff.
The program, he said, was sustained by money from Cuenco’s pork barrel funds and received a total of P30 million in the two years he was there.
The program’s components included the purchase of medicines and the giving away of these medicines to indigent patients of the VSMCC.
All the medicines were secured exclusively from Dell Pharmacy, which Villacin owns. The facility used to be located right across the VSMMC compound.
Money for the medicines was, in turn, obtained from the VSMMC, which handled Cuenco’s PDAF allocation.
“I didn’t handle any money. The entire staff only took charge of the processing of documents. We processed everything even though we knew it was anomalous because we were afraid to lose our jobs,” Yrastorza, who admits to be a distant relative of the congressman, said. (KNR)
