CAMARINES Sur Rep. Leni Robredo said Friday the administration candidates had the most to lose after President Benigno Aquino III rejected the P2,000 across-the-board pension increase for the pensioners of the Social Security System.
“It’s true that those who will suffer are the administration candidates because the backlash will probably be ours,” Robredo, the ruling Liberal Party’s candidate for vice president, told reporters in Albay province.
But she was quick to defend Aquino’s decision, saying he must have “done the right thing” to strengthen the SSS.
“If the claim of the SSS leadership is true, it’s really the obligation of the President to protect us all,” Robredo said.
“I think that will be good for us all. If it’s true [that] in seven [years] the [pension fund] will go bankrupt, we really need to think about it.”
Aquino III on Thursday vetoed the SSS pension bill that Congress approved last month, saying the viability of the SSS, which has 31 million members from the private sector, would be seriously compromised.
“The stability of the entire SSS benefit system…will be seriously compromised in favor of two million pensioners and their dependents,” Aquino said.
He said the pension increase, if approved, would result in an annual payout of P56 billion, or far higher than the SSS’s annual investment income of P30 billion to P40 billion.
Senator Cynthia Villar, the lead proponent of the SSS pension bill in the Senate, said Aquino’s decision to reject the bill could take its toll on the candidates he had been endorsing for the May 9 national and local elections. John Paolo Bencito
“It is very sad that the merit of the bill and the help it intends to bring were overlooked and will no longer be enjoyed by the pensioners,” said Villar, the head of the committee on government corporations and public enterprises.
A political analyst said Friday that the other presidential aspirants could use the veto as ammunition against the Liberal Party’s standard bearer Manuel Roxas II.
“We cannot say that it’s impossible to happen especially if the candidates would use this as an election issue,” Aries Arugay, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, said in an ANC television interview.