"The President must intervene."
Taking cue from President Rodrigo Duterte’s pronouncement late last year that he would spend his remaining time in office going after corrupt people in government, the employees of APO Production Unit Inc. on Monday held a strike and called on the President to replace APO President and Chairman Michael Dalumpines for anomalies and financial irregularities that have occurred during his tenure. These are issues that resulted in the failure of the government-owned and -controlled corporation to remit millions of pesos to the national government, as well as conditions detrimental to the welfare of APUI's workforce.
In a statement, the Asian Productivity Employees Association led by its president, Alvin Gavilan slammed Dalumpines for “conniving with APO's joint-venture partner United Graphic Expression Corporation to deprive the government of millions of pesos in dividends.”
According to Dalumpines, APO did not remit a single centavo to the national government last year despite the fact that from 2015 to 2020, the APO-UGEC JV earned an estimated P13 billion, from which but APO only received 335 million pesos, or 2.5 percent.
APO is a GOCC attached to the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO). It prints Philippine passports and other sensitive government documents such as the Import Commodity Clearance stickers of the Department of Trade and Industry and cigarette tax stamps of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.
It has been operating under the control and supervision of the Presidential Communication Operations Office pursuant to Executive Order No. 4 dated July 30, 2010 signed by former President Noynoy Aquino.
According to Gavilan, even stockholders of UGEC have warned PCOO Secretary Martin Andanar that based on UGEC's financial records, UGEC should have remitted a total of over half a billion pesos for the years 2013 to 2020, instead of just P259 million.
Aside from failing to remit the proper dividends to the government, under Dalumpines, APO employees have yet to receive overdue salary increases, and have been forced to work despite the dangers posed by COVID-19, added Gavilan.
Dalumpines’ tenure in APO is no stranger to scrutiny. Authorities are reportedly investigating APO officials for allegedly modifying equipment used to scan cigarette tax stamps without the approval of the BIR. The Commission on Audit has likewise flagged APO for violating government procurement laws by sub-contracting sensitive official documents to private corporations.
Last year, Dalumpines, along with 12 others were charged with corruption before the Office of the Ombudsman for allegedly rigging a bidding process and illegally awarding a multi-billion-peso contract to the joint venture of Iris Corporation and Mara Linux and Business Solutions.
The complainant Myrna Gonzales, an employee of Kolonwel Trading, revealed the alleged rigging of the multi-billion-peso bidding process that favored the said organizations despite being disqualified by the law.
Aside from Dalumpines, also charged before the anti-graft court were members of APO’s Board of Trustees namely, Philip Dionisio, Guilmar Vidanes, Alvin Reyes, Joel Caminade, Joecel Obenza, and Jose Julio, and the members of the Bids and Award Committee in Karl Paulo Damian, Josefina Omol, Frederick Taru, Dominic Tjon, Michael Santiago and Ramon Matibag.
Gonzales, whose company lost the bidding process, accused Dalumpines and the other officers of allegedly recommending the awarding of contracts to Iris and Mara Linux groups despite recommendations by APO Technical Working Group to disqualify them earlier.
The project which requires of support and maintenance of tobacco stamps to be issued by the Bureau of Internal Revenue amounted to P450 million.
Those are pretty serious charges against Dalumpines and the people, not only the government are losing heavily, if those allegations are true.
This time, the employees themselves are coming out in the open to denounce the alleged corruption over at APO. If the President is really serious in his vow to spend his remaining months in office going after corruption in the government, maybe he should start listening to the APO employees.
“We appeal to the President to order a thorough investigation of APO and to immediately replace its Chairman and President. Controversy has hounded his management of APO, and as the expression goes, where there is smoke, there is fire – and right now there is a raging fire of corruption in APO,” Galvin says.
And Duterte should act before the fire engulfs the whole of APO.
