Manolo Quezon is #TheExplainer Newsletter - Issue #30: Go, going, gone
My column this week takes stock of Bong Go: unknown to many, he is one of the champion bureaucratic infighters of all time, and the latest in a long tradition of irreplaceable lieutenants to presidents. Why he has been seemingly check-mated in the Senate. In at least 12 previous columns I traced the story of the titanic struggle for the direction of the Duterte presidency wages between Go and his allies and Evasco and his allies.
This Week's Long View
Go, going, gone | Inquirer Opinion — opinion.inquirer.net
By: Manuel L. Quezon III - @inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:05 AM September 01, 2021
Recently in my newsletter, I repeated my belief that presidents are brought down not by their critics but rather, themselves. Take the President who has remained bulletproof as far as criticism is concerned because of two things. First, his systematic targeting of sectors and institutions to instill terror and thus, create an atmosphere of intimidation. Second, his being able to point to his lifestyle as unostentatious and thus, devoid of the cupidity associated with corruption. The two, in turn, could occur because of careful stage managing that kept the President out of the public eye except when he was rolled out to seize the headlines.
The stage manager was Christopher Go who carved out a remarkably powerful role for himself as Special Assistant to the President and holder of the Presidential Management Staff (PMS) portfolio. By all accounts, he hit the ground running, firing nearly everyone in the Protocol Office, and instituting a kind of hall monitor system complete with permission slips, putting an end to the free-flowing kibitzing that characterizes the Palace’s working culture. The result was an iron-clad news and information blackout in the Palace, strengthened by the removal of the permanent staff of the PMS to Aurora Boulevard.
Go then went on to mount one of the most effective, systematic takedowns of a rival faction in any administration: his bureaucratic battle, waged through competing executive issuances by the President, dismantled the administrative empire Cabinet Secretary Leoncio Evasco Jr. had created; in this manner, Evasco’s ideological objective of creating a permanent political movement was defanged, then killed off. Evasco left the government to pursue local office, lost, and came back to a powerless sinecure in the Palace after the midterms.
As for Go, like Caligula, who made a horse into a senator, the President turned his workhorse into a senator, too. Here, Go experienced the usual culture shock in reverse: senators ending up in the executive have found the doing difficult because of having built a career on talking; Go, instead, went from essentially running the country for the President to the Senate which involves an unfamiliar skillset. So much so that, while a member of the blue ribbon committee, he has found himself unable to influence the collapse of the corruption-free aura of his principal, the President. Another senator, Franklin Drilon, once upon a time made the transition from the executive to the legislative but without ending up dazed and confused. And so it’s because of Drilon that videos such as the RTVM documentation of the President in Panacan, Davao City, meeting with the executives of Pharmally International Holdings on March 17, 2017, are suddenly very embarrassing indeed.
Recall in September last year, Drilon had flagged the purchase of COVID-19 test kits from Pharmally; what was eventually disclosed was that after that transaction, billions of pesos were transferred by the Department of Health (DOH) to the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), an office held by Lloyd Christopher Lao since 2019 (he’d formerly headed the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board, obtaining an extortion case for his efforts). Government offices, unable or unwilling to handle procurements, can and do, ask DBM to do it on their behalf; but that is generally on the pretext of lacking expertise in either procurement or the items to be procured: a surprising state of affairs on the part of medical equipment for purchase by the DOH. Drilon has been saying that Lao had to have had a backer, for a formerly obscure company to win billions in bids (for products costing more than those offered by other bidders) and identifying that backer will crack the case which, so far, is a “circumstantial” one. Go could have led the charge to vindicate his own name in the Senate but the best he could was call for Health Secretary Francisco Duque III to resign.
Instead, what has happened is that Go’s planned coronation as the presidential candidate of the ruling PDP-Laban (which already successfully excreted senators Pacquiao and Pimentel from its ranks) became a casualty of the lousy Lao story. This represented a double whammy to the ruling coalition because no less than “Daughterte” had been going after Go, identified as a gopher with too much veto power over who got to see the President, by issuing pointed statements as the press feasted on speculation that the President’s first family was in revolt against his second family.
Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3
The Go-Evasco Showdown
Christopher Go bears study because of his success in the difficult game of Palace infighting, in the absolute trust he enjoys, and the near carte blanceh one suspects he has, from a President uninterested in much of the daily grind of governance. Add the human dimension of what seems to be intense resentment on the part of the President's daughter, and you have a truly Renaissance story.
As I mentioned in my column, it was preceded by my most recent newsletter which reflected on the sudden transformation from invulnerability to vulnerability, of the President:
Consider the face shield revelations. One could even argue it’s been enough to (temporarily at least) deflate the Go trial balloon. The timing was enough to revive the Pacquiao-Pimentel insurgency, and perhaps even get enough people to start talking (seriously) of bad blood between the President’s daughter and himself plus Go. These aren’t tussles that can be rationally explained away.
It still spares the President in the manner allegations against Imelda Marcos spared her husband on the excuse that he was either deceived or betrayed; the same can be said of the spat between the President’s daughter and Go, on the same grounds. It becomes a destabilizing conflict precisely because it can’t be explained away or factored in on rational grounds: so used to the formerly solid (or solid-appearing) front that even critics are skeptical something so formerly ironclad could be unraveling over “feelings.” But it happens.
I have been following, to speak forensically for a bit, the ins and outs of who's in and out, in the President's clique, and here are 12 instances that tell the tale of how we got to the current goings-on about Go.
By December 14, 2016 the lay of the land, as far as the Palace and thus the presidency, was concerned, had already become clear. The two people that mattered were Evasco and Go.
As of January 18, 2017 the staggering ambition --and organization-- of Evasco's vision to remold the bureaucracy, change the constitution, and institute a permanent power-holding mass movement, was not only evident but being attempted.
January 25, 2017 saw glimpses of the party cadre past of Evasco playing out in his vision of a mass movement to make all political parties obsolete.
By March 1, 2017 it became clear that while Evasco might push,. others would push back. The first reverses or limits to what the rest of the administration would be willing to do, was becoming noticeable.
By April 19, 2017, Go being the rival power center --and increasingly a more succesful one-- was identifiable, as was the battleground between Evasco and himself (executive issuances, proof of access to, and thus support from, the President).
On September 27, 2017 it became indisputable that Evasco's ambitious plans were in ruins and thaqt the victor in the showdown was Go. There was paperwork to prove it.
February 7, 2018: the fight over rice tariffs also illustrated the factional infighting and alliances that were created on an ad hoc basis. In this case, a murky story did reveal glimpses of Evasco, Go, and Piñol.
Another glimpse of the way Go mattered in Palace intramurals was on show on the same topic --rice importation-- on April 18, 2018.
By November 7, 2018, Evasco was well and truly done --and out (he would go on to lose his bid for local office). The remnants of his administrative empire were abolished at that time. Go was the last man standing.
As things geared up for the 2019 midterms, on February 13, 2019 I provided a glimpse into the party political and not just bureaucratic politics, side of Bong Go: his ability to knock down rivals for the senate.
From time to time we see the ghosts pf Evasco's political project in schemes dusted off then almost as quickly forgotten again, as I noted on July 24, 2019.
On June 30, 2021 I pointed out the legacy of the struggle between Evasco and Go was the direction the administration would take --which has consequences increasingly felt as the term winds down.
The issue at hand
Here is how Senator Franklin Drilon has laid out the story in his press release:
As early as September last year and even before the Commission of Audit released its report, Drilon had already flagged the overpricing of supplies that PS-DBM bought from Pharmally.
In 2020, Drilon exposed and questioned why PS-DBM bought 2,000 units of COVID-19 test kits from Pharmally for P344,000 or for a total of P688 million when it could be bought at P240,000 per kit. Drilon said the purchase is overpriced by P208 million.
The minority leader had earlier suspected of a well-planned plot to plunder funds through the PS-DBM.
Drilon said the “circumstantial evidence would show patterns of corruption.”
The plot started with the appointment of Lloyd Christopher Lao to the Department of Budget and Management as early as August 2019 despite a pending extortion case when he was chairman of the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board. Then, Lao was appointed as head of the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM) on January 2, 2020.
Meanwhile, the Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corporation was incorporated in September 2019 with the Securities and Exchange of Commission (SEC) with a paid-capital of only P625,000.
The Government Procurement Policy Board issued a resolution on March 17, 2020 to include face masks and PPEs as common use supply to allow PS-DBM to purchase them. Later on, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III ordered the transfer of around P42 billion of DOH COVID-19 funds to PS-DBM starting March 27, 2020.
Just two weeks after DOH transferred the funds to PS-DBM sans a memorandum of agreement, the procurement agency began awarding billions of contracts to Pharmally that reached about P8.6 billion in a span of less than two months from April to June 2020.
Lao bought from Pharmally facemasks at P27.72, when other suppliers sold the same to PS-DBM at P13.5, P16, and P17.50 for the same period, according to Drilon.
Lao also bought overpriced PPEs from Pharmally worth P3.82 billion on May 8, 2020 and test kits worth P2.88 billion on June 9, 2020, he added.
Based on Pharmally’s financial statement submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission SEC), Pharmally’s income soared to P284.9 million in 2020 from zero declared income in 2019. Its assets also jumped to P284.9 million in 2020 from P599,000 in 2019.
What folliows are the three in-depth investigative articles of Rappler on the topic.
Biggest pandemic supplier has links to ex-Duterte adviser Michael Yang — www.rappler.com [EXCLUSIVE] Securities and Exchange Commission documents show how Yang is connected to the embattled Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corporation, supplier of pandemic supplies flagged by auditors to be overpriced
Pharmally had P625,000 capital before bagging P8 billion in COVID-19 contracts — www.rappler.com Government documents bare the story of a small new company edging out those with a long history of public procurements
Pharmally executives, Michael Yang associate wanted in Taiwan — www.rappler.com The Taiwan government is after Huang Wen Lie, Huang Tzu Yen, and Michael Yang’s business partner for financial crimes
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