WE ARE ALREADY BEING ROBBED BY AQUINO AND ABAD!

The P10-billion question

By Manila Standard Today | Posted 4 hours ago | 181 views

ADMINISTRATION officials cannot simply wave away serious doubts about its plan to give away up to P10 billion in public funds to a private foundation in the United States to establish two research institutes in California.
Already, two officials of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) have protested the Philippine-California Advanced Research Institute (PCARI) project, which will set up and manage institutes in the University of California Berkley and UC San Francisco focusing on health care and information technology.
CHED Commissioner Nona Ricafort, who had quit, and Director Carmina Alonzo raised some serious questions that neither the commission chairman Patricia Licuanan nor Budget Secretary Florencio Abad have adequately addressed. Nor have the Palace minions who haunt the social networks managed to defend the program against the whiff of irregularity.
Here, if they wish to address them point by point, are the questions that must be answered:
1) What is the legal basis for the P10-billion allocation?
2) Is there a binding contract with any of the US-based universities? If so, what are the terms of those contracts?
3) Why is there no counterpart funding for the project?
4) Why was the project farmed out to a private foundation without the benefit of a public bidding?
5) Is it true that the Philippine government will not own any patents from the inventions and discoveries made by the US-based research teams?
6) Why is the CHED the lead agency when the Department of Science and Technology would be more appropriate?
7) Why should research on tropical illnesses be conducted in the United States, where many of these diseases do not even exist, and where the expertise to deal with them would be even more difficult to find?
8) If the project is as “beautiful” as Abad says it is, why are details about it so nebulous?
The answers to these questions will have serious implications on the legality and propriety of the PCARI project, and the administration must answer each one to the satisfaction of a skeptical public that has seen the folly of entrusting public funds to non-government organizations. Shooting the messenger will not work.
But there is one more, P10 billion question, and it goes like this: Is it correct for this government to pump P10 billion into US-based institutes while cutting back on funding for local state universities and colleges?
Last month, 20 lawmakers protested impending budget cuts worth P3.3 billion for 79 out of 110 state universities and colleges in the proposed 2014 budget.
The same Budget Department that is so eager to give away P10 billion to a US-based private foundation actually slashed the 2014 budget of the University of the Philippines to P8.1 billion, which is even lower than this year’s budget of P9.5 billion. Now that’s just not right.