Belat: the PHP 250,000 punchline

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Somewhere in this republic, a man named Xuniso P. Belat exists, and the official record says the government paid him for information.

Belat. Say it out loud. It is the sound a child makes with the tongue out and a finger dragging down one eyelid, the oldest taunt in any Philippine schoolyard. Someone typed it onto a form, signed it, filed it, and the Office of the Vice President carried that piece of paper into its liquidation of confidential funds as proof that public money had gone somewhere useful.

He has company. The acknowledgment receipts that House private prosecutor Amando Virgil Ligutan laid before the impeachment court on Monday also list Antonio Pagong, Timon Andrew Pusa, Don Piang, May Pamana, and Shane Ngitngit. A turtle. A cat. An inheritance. A surname that means seething. Timon, if I recall the movie correctly, was the meerkat, and he did not work in intelligence.

I keep trying to picture the afternoon this happened. A stack of blank forms. A ballpen that skips. Somebody has to produce names by close of business, and the names have to look like people, and there are only so many surnames a tired man can invent between merienda and quitting time. So the turtle from the fable goes on line one. The cat goes on line two. By the time he reaches the bottom of the pile he is no longer inventing, he is amusing himself, and he writes Belat, and nobody in the chain above him reads far enough to notice, and the receipts move up the building like any other paperwork. That is the part that should keep people awake. Not the audacity. The boredom.

The amounts beside those names run from PHP 100,000 to PHP 250,000, booked for information, transportation, supplies, and other costs of confidential operations. For scale: PHP 250,000 is roughly what a public school teacher takes home in eight or nine months. Pagong got it for a tip.

The witness who submitted the paperwork cannot tell you whether any of these people exist. Gina Acosta, the former special disbursing officer of the OVP, told the court on Monday that she was not present when the money changed hands and that she relied on Colonel Raymund Lachica and the documents he handed back to her afterward. Asked directly whether she was there, she gave the four words that now define this trial: “Wala po ako doon.”

Under Ligutan’s questioning, she narrowed her role until almost nothing was left inside it. Her certification, she said, covered the accuracy of the entries: the period, the particulars, the entity, and the amount. It did not cover whether the funds were actually spent the way the entries claimed. She certified that the menu was spelled correctly, but she did not claim there was a kitchen.

Now hold that aside from the arithmetic. Lachica received PHP 500 million in four tranches, PHP 125 million in December 2022 and PHP 125 million in each of the first three quarters of 2023. Lachica was not bonded with the Bureau of the Treasury, only Acosta was. The officer legally answerable for the money is the one who never saw where it went, and the officer who moved it on the ground carried no bond.

The more scandalous part is when Acosta testified that Lachica signed acknowledgment receipts when he took the bulk funds, and later asked that those receipts be returned to him once the liquidations were in. The paper trail was built to eat itself.

Consider what the rest of us go through. A sari-sari store owner in Jaro cannot deduct a PHP 350 ream of bond paper without an official receipt bearing a TIN, a business address, and an authority to print. Our own reporters file jeepney fares with the date written on the stub. Every barangay treasurer in this country has been made to explain a missing signature on a PHP 2,000 disbursement. And here is half a billion pesos liquidated on the word of a colonel, supported by receipts signed by a cartoon meerkat.

This is where the joke stops being funny: confidential funds are exempt from ordinary public scrutiny precisely because the receipts are supposed to be real. The secrecy is not a favor granted to officials but a trade. The public gives up the right to look, and in exchange the accountable officer certifies, under her bond and under the law, that what is written down is true. Take the truth out of the receipts, and nothing survives of the bargain except the secrecy, which is another way of saying the money simply left.

Ligutan understood this, which is why his last question asked whether the arrangement between Acosta and Lachica amounted to a scam or outright swindling of public funds. Defense counsel Lindon Bacquel objected. Presiding officer Senator Francis Escudero sided with the defense and ordered the word “scam” stricken, on the ground that the characterization did not come from the witness.

Fair enough. That is how a court of law works, and Escudero has been patient with a witness who has now said she was not there roughly twenty times.

But the word was struck only from the transcript. It could not be struck from the receipts, which are still sitting in the record of the Senate impeachment court, still bearing their names, still claiming that this country’s secret expenditures were handed to a turtle, a cat, and a man who signed off with a taunt.

Somebody laughed all the way to the bank. He only had the manners to sign for it first.