Ex-Cebu mayor fined over Yolanda aid ‘flip-flop’

The Office of the Ombudsman has fined former Daanbantayan, Cebu Mayor Augusto Corro after finding him guilty of simple negligence due to flip-flopping on the release of financial assistance for victims of Typhoon Yolanda. 

The Ombudsman ordered Corro to pay a fine equivalent to his two months’ salary for the offense. It, however, found no probable cause to file graft charges against him.

Corro is accused of changing the list of beneficiaries of the Emergency Shelter Assistance (ESA) of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) for Yolanda victims.

Under the ESA program, qualified residents are entitled to receive P30,000 for those whose houses were completely destroyed and P10,000 for those whose houses were partially damaged by the super typhoon, which brought massive destruction in the Visayas region in November 2013, killing over 6,000.

The DSWD tapped local government units in Yolanda-affected areas to provide the list of potential beneficiaries. Daanbantayan submitted a list with more than 16,000 names in October 2014.

In January 2015, the DSWD then released a memorandum disqualifying all residents living in designated no-build zones, which affected the eligibility of complainant Renato Benatiro, a resident of Barangay Tapilon.

The Mines and Geosciences Bureau, however, issued a letter dated March 25, 2015, saying “Barangay Tapilon is generally not within a danger/unsafe zone for rain-induced landslide and flooding.”

Corro then wrote to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources requesting “technical assistance to establish the unsafe zones as the local government is having difficulty in establishing the so-called unsafe or no-build zones due to the absence of technical personnel.”

He later said in his counter-affidavit to the Ombudsman that the local government “suspended the ESA distribution in the areas near the shorelines pending the technical determination of unsafe zones by the proper government authorities.”

In its resolution, the Ombudsman took fault on Corro for disqualifying Benatiro “on the ground that his house was located within the unsafe zone but four months later they claimed that the municipality has not yet determined its danger/unsafe zone.”

“If it is true that the municipality merely withheld the ESA of those residing near the shorelines pending proper identification of its danger/unsafe zones, the remarks appearing next to complainant’s name on the list, as well as that of the others, should have been ‘for verification’ and not a categorical and unqualified ‘unsafe zone’,” it added.

The anti-graft body further noted that Corro hastily disqualified Benatiro without referring to the town’s Comprehensive Land Use Plan.

Meanwhile, the Ombudsman also called the attention of the DSWD for being “noticeably tardy in crafting guidelines for the proper implementation of its ESA program.”

“Memorandum Circular No. 24 came out only after the original list was submitted to DSWD regional office and, by that time, those included were already thinking that they qualified for assistance,” the Ombudsman said. —KBK, GMA News