Chiz asks who hogged swine funds

Press Release
By Office of Senator Chiz Escudero
April 4, 2008

PASAY CITY, Philippines  –  Senator Chiz Escudero today urged Quedancor, the agency that lent out billions of pesos in swine-raising funds to farmers, to publish – Bar exam results-style – borrowers who have been remiss in repaying their loan.

"Publication is the only way to know if the funds were indeed received by farmers as claimed by Quedancor. The proof of the lending is in the listing", he said.

"The list will tell us who hogged the swine funds, and if the money was indeed used to fatten some pigs or fatten someone's bank account or campaign war chest", he said, referring to reports that implementation of the Quedan and Rural Credit Corp.'s P2.2 billion pig-dispersal program coincided with the 2004 presidential elections.

The senator said the search for the list of those who likely partook of the swine fund could be likened to the palace's deliberate manipulation of funds to select political minions. "Only that was a figurative pork. Now we are looking for the literal pork, to whom did these porks go"?

Escudero said Quedancor officers cannot give the "limp excuse" that the list of beneficiaries was lost "because as a financial institution they are supposed to be as fastidious about records as bankers."

"If the distribution (of pigs) did happen, then there should be a paper trail like receipts and vouchers, "he said.

"The only excuse they can probably think of as to why no records were kept was that the pigs were so numerous that they had to be parachuted into farms, in a massive bombardment of the countryside of airborne swine," he said.

If the "pigs did land or if they arrived by other means," then a publication of the names of delinquent borrowers will trigger a "shame campaign" that will force them into settling their account, Escudero said.

If Quedancor has a record of them, Escudero said publishing the names of borrowers should not be hard "considering the fact that we regularly publish nursing board result which contains as much as 35,000 names".