The Office of the Ombudsman has ordered the withdrawal of cases recently filed before the Sandiganbayan in connection with the multibillion-peso Pharmally scandal – a controversy that tainted the Duterte administration’s pandemic response.
Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla said the cases will be reviewed again, explaining that he wants them to be ‘ready for trial’ before being refiled.
‘I gave instructions to withdraw first the cases of Pharmally where there has been no arraignment yet with the Sandiganbayan, because I want to reevaluate the cases, I want to know the details, which are put into the cases, because it really matters,’ Remulla said in a press briefing on Monday afternoon.
‘I want the Sandiganbayan to have a good grasp of the cases immediately. What I want is for when we file the information at the Sandiganbayan, they are all ready for trial. And I don’t feel that kind of within the complaint that we have filed,’ he added.
He noted that the handling of the cases before lacked coordination among the fact-finding, evaluation, preliminary investigation, and prosecution teams.
‘Everybody was in the dark; it was not working as a complete team. That should be a fully laid-out plan. It can’t be segmented, with one team not knowing what the other is doing,’ Remulla said.
‘That is why I really thought it was wiser to withdraw these cases so that we could re-evaluate them, to make sure that the work done by the investigators, the Senate, and everyone involved in uncovering the Pharmally cases would not go to waste,’ he further explained.
A Senate blue ribbon committee probe from August 2021 to January 2022 found that Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. won contracts amounting to P11.5 billion despite having a paid-up capital of only P625,000. It was the single biggest chunk of government contracts for COVID-19 supplies awarded to private companies at the time.
The contracts included 8,000 BGI real-time fluorescent RT-PCR test kits, amounting to P600 million; 2,000 A*Star Fortitude RT-PCR test kits worth P688 million; and 41,400 BGI real-time fluorescent RT-PCR kits worth P2.877 billion.
Former Senator Richard ‘Dick’ Gordon, who led the probe as chair of the Senate blue ribbon committee earlier, urged Remulla to revisit the case and asserted that Duterte should be held responsible for defrauding the government at the height of the pandemic. /jpv