MANILA: Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago believes that an impeachment complaint against President Benigno Aquino III over the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Programme (DAP) will not succeed.
Santiago said Aquino should be proven first that he intended to misappropriate the funds released under the DAP. She said Aquino cannot also be impeached since he has allies in both chambers of Congress. “Even theoretically, I don’t think that he would qualify for impeachment. And besides, in reality it’s not going to work. It will not play out because he is in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate,” Santiago said in the interview yesterday morning.
Santiago added that it would be impossible for lawmakers who got the DAP funds to impeach Aquino since they will also implicate themselves. “If they impeach the President, they are in effect admitting that they are at the very least accomplices or accessories to a crime,” Santiago said.
The controversial DAP was introduced by the Aquino administration in 2011 to help accelerate economy, which was sluggish then supposedly due to government underspending. According to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), DAP-supported releases have been made to national government agencies and various projects endorsed by senators since 2011.
The DBM said a total of P137.3bn had been released from the DAP as of October 1. The funds under this scheme were sourced from the overall savings of the national government, according to the agency. Santiago has said the DAP was illegal as it was not contained in the 2011 or 2012 appropriations and they were taken from alleged slow-moving government projects that did not create savings. On Wednesday, Aquino defended the scheme and challenged its critics to pursue an impeachment complaint against him over the alleged misuse of the funds sourced from it. He insisted that the scheme will stand legal scrutiny as it has a constitutional basis. The Philippine star
