Senate probers are summoning face shield supplier Pharmally’s chief accountant Jeff Mariano to appear next week and produce records on three main items in the company’s financial statements submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as senators dug deeper Thursday into the 2020 audit report on budget utilization of the Department of Health (DOH), including expenditures to contain the Covid contagion.
This, as Senate Minority Leader Franklin M. Drilon sought the presence of Mariano at the next hearing, with instructions to bring documents supporting a P33-million deed of
donation that Pharmally made to unidentified parties; the P7.486 billion in sales Pharmally declared in its financial statement sent to SEC; and the assets in foreign currencies which generated a declared foreign exchange gains of P63.2 million.
Drilon demanded the presence of Mariano after extensively grilling the external auditor who signed off on Pharmally’s financial statement submitted to the SEC.
The auditor, Illuminada Sebial, told senators she kept no copies of any documents, and that when she started asking Pharmally for these documents because she had been summoned by the senators, Mariano allegedly told her to just say Pharmally was keeping all the papers.
Senators Drilon and Richard J. Gordon, and later joined by Sen. Panfilo Lacson, separately warned Sebial she “could be in trouble” for signing as external auditor without carefully checking the basis for entries in the financial statement.
Special audit
Also at Thursday’s hearing, Commission on Audit (COA) Chairman Michael Aguinaldo told senators COA has actually started a “special audit” of the use of pandemic funds, as requested of them earlier.
Aguinaldo said he initially targeted the special audit to be done by October, but from all indications, he estimates it could be done only by year-end.
The COA’s 2020 report on “deficiencies” in DOH’s use of pandemic funds had triggered motu proprio investigation by the Blue Ribbon, after COA flagged the wholesale transfer by DOH of P42 billion in pandemic response funds to the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM). COA said this should not have been done by Health Secretary Francisco Duque III without a memorandum of agreement between DOH and PS-DBM.
PS-DBM’s negotiated contracts with Pharmally has emerged as the most notable among the PS-DBM deals because senators said the latter did not do due diligence on the legal, technical and financial capability of Pharmally, a P650,000 start-up that bagged some P12 billion in contracts from the P42 billion that DOH moved to PS-DBM.
At the 10th hearing, two resource persons were a no-show: Krizle Grace Mago, the Pharmally executive who admitted to senators last September 24 that she instructed warehousemen to alter the manufacturing dates of face shields that Pharmally was to supply to DOH; and Rose Nono Lim, another Pharmally executive, whose lawyer said was sidelined by “abdominal pain.”
Mago has gone “missing” since Friday night, after the Senate offered to give her protective custody.