Palace Admits Arroyo Overspending on Travels

The Malacanang presidential palace has admitted that since 2001, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has surpassed her budget for local and foreign travels by at least one billion pesos ($20.8 million).

Image via Wikipedia

But despite this, Malacanang officials insisted that Arroyo has not committed any irregularity since her expenditures remained within the regular operating budget of the Office of the President for the past eight years.

Deputy Executive Secretary for Finance and Administration Susana Vargas said Arroyo increased her travel funds by taking money from her office’s maintenance and operating budget and her contingency fund, which are allowed by the law.

 “For an allocation of the Office of the President of P1,439,232,000 ($29.2 million) for local and foreign trips, we spent from 2001 to August 14, P2,499,280,595.08 ($50 million),” Vargas said in a news conference in Malacanang.

She said when the President travels abroad, the Office of the President pays for the President’s airfare, hotel accommodations, supplies, equipment rental, transportation, Filipino community expenses, and gratuities. Also covered in the budget are the travel expenses of the President’s spouse as well as the President’s administrative and security staff.

 However, Vargas denied that Arroyo paid for the lavish dinners and travel expenses of many of the lawmakers who accompanied her in her recent US visit. She said the Office of the President only paid for the travel expenses of Senators Miriam Santiago and Lito Lapid and House Speaker Prospero Nograles.

“Not a single centavo of government fund for the congressmen,” she said.

The House of Representatives and even the US government have also denied paying for the trip of the 25 congressmen who were with Arroyo in her US visit.

But the congressmen themselves denied that they used their own pocket money in their trip, sparking the mystery on who actually paid for their travel expenses.

“We only provided security.” The US Embassy in Manila said in a statement in response to  a statement by Nograles who said that host governments usually shoulder the basic expenses of visiting dignitaries.

Earlier, Nograles denied that the House of Representatives footed the congressmen’s bill. He had speculated that the US government and Malacanang split the bill for the lawmakers, but this was later rejected by both the US Embassy and Malacanang.

“The US government only provided security protection for the visit, as is normally provided for foreign leaders meeting with President Obama,” Rebecca Thompson, the US embassy’s deputy press officer , said when asked if the US government paid for any part of the Philippine lawmakers’ trip.

Meanwhile, one of the congressmen admitted that he paid $12,000 and a $1,500 tip at a restaurant in Washington DC during one of the expensive dinners for the Arroyo delegation.

Congressman Danilo Suarez, representing a district of Quezon province that is one of the poorest in the Philippines, said he paid the bill at the Bobby Van’s Steak House in Washington D.C. on July 30, even showing to reporters that receipt to prove his claim.

Suarez said he hosted the dinner to celebrate the 41st wedding anniversary of Arroyo and her husband.

“I was the one who hosted the dinner, and it would be embarrassing if I let others foot the bill,” Suarez said.

The congressman, who is a close ally of the President, said the Washington dinner was not the first time he treated Arroyo to a meal during her foreign trips. He said he allocates personal money to pay for these expenses.

For his part, Deputy Presidential Spokesman Gary Olivar argued that Arroyo’s bloated travel budget is negated by the bigger amount of benefits she obtained from her foreign and local travels in terms of trade, investments, and security.

 “If the benefits you bring back are in excess of whatever you spent, then you are still ahead of the game. You never evaluate budget excess spending on its own. You always look at what the excess spending brings back to you,” he said.

 According to Olivar, among the benefits Arroyo brought home from her US visits alone are the $136 million development assistance from Washington, the $1.6 billion benefit from the RP-US trade arrangement in 2008, the $198 million from the benefits from Filipino World War II veterans, $429 million in military assistance in the last decade, and $212 million in US aid to Mindanao from 2001 to 2008.