Senator Antonio Trillanes IV on Tuesday said he will file a plunder case against Senator Richard Gordon before the Office of the Ombudsman on Wednesday regarding alleged anomalies at the Philippine Red Cross, of which Gordon is chairman.
“I will be filing the case tomorrow, plunder, against Senator Gordon, tomorrow morning. This is in relation to plundering government funds and allocated them to the Red Cross,” he said.
Trillanes accused Gordon of channelling his Priority Development Assistance Fund allocations to the Red Cross.
“He uses Red Cross for his own interest,” said Trillanes, who in September filed an ethics complaint against Gordon with the Senate ethics committee.
“It’s more than the P50-million threshold so it’s there. Tomorrow, it’s there in the attachments, the documentary evidence,” he added.
Trillanes said Gordon allocated his PDAF or pork barrel funds to the Red Cross during the latter’s first term as senator, while he was also chairman of the humanitarian organization.
“That’s prohibited. It’s like the Napoles scam. If you will look at it, there’s no problem because it’s the Red Cross, but [Gordon] was the chairman and he disbursed the funds,” he said.
Trillanes said he would also write the Commission on Audit to start an investigation on the PRC funds, and to the International Federation of the Red Cross to conduct an independent audit of its local arm.
“Once I already filed that [complaint] and the [Senate] session [is]opened [from recess], I will come out with this to our colleagues in the Senate, that we have a chairman of the Blue Ribbon Committee to investigate acts of corruption, but he himself has a plunder case and had committed several anomalies,” he explained.
Trillanes said it was a shame he had to file charges, and as “a matter of delicadeza, which I don’t expect also from Senator Gordon.”
But Gordon remained unperturbed by the plunder charge, and said he is ready to answer it. The senator insisted he has never received any salary from his job at the Red Cross, which is billed as a volunteer organization.