On Sec. Florencio Abad

By Rod P. Kapunan

Secretary Florencio Abad of the Department of Budget and Management and his yellow hypocrites in this tuwad na daan government should understand that not all are stupid to swallow hook, line and sinker their propaganda. 

The public official who releases the money without examining and verifying the person to whom he is going to hand over the public fund is more liable than the person who presented herself as the operator or head of the NGO having the intention of defrauding the government. 

The swindling could not happen had Abad not allowed the public funds to be recklessly released to Janet Napoles. The burden and the guilt is more on him because it was he who parted the money that made possible the commission of that large-scale swindling of government funds.

In fact, the public even have the right to accuse Abad, and rightly so, of conspiring with Napoles in looting the public funds or PDAF because the release happened as a result of his approval. Abad, as one lawyer pointed out, cannot stand as an aggrieved person and use that as his defense with the right to sue Napoles because he is not the owner of those billions of pesos that were dissipated, but a mere trustee of government funds.

That means that in case of loss, automatically as public servant and the man in charged, Abad assumes liability for everything that is lost in his office. He should know that many bank tellers and employees are summarily dismissed from the service and even made to pay the lost amount not because they stole the money, but because of negligence. That explains why Abad and his cohorts in the DBM cannot escape criminal liability.

To allow him to use that defense is tantamount to saying that stupidity and negligence are valid grounds for those who consciously allowed the crime to happen to escape liability. Common sense, not even law, will tell that Abad is not the far more guilty, but the most guilty than the three senators the yellow dogs have long been maligning!