Insisting she was not the mastermind of the pork barrel scam, Janet Lim-Napoles says she was mentored in the ways of doing business with lawmakers by then congressman and now Budget Secretary Florencio Abad, whose name she has included along with 18 incumbent and former senators in an “expanded” affidavit. “I am not the most guilty,” Napoles said in Filipino in her 32-page affidavit. She said she got to know the people in the pork barrel scam through some agents, pointing to them as the ones who had peddled PDAF projects of the affected lawmakers. “I learned from Cong. Butch Abad that NGOs and cooperatives were needed to negotiate with agencies,” she said. She said that it was in 2000 when she was introduced by a certain Manuel Jarmin to Abad, then still a congressman of Batanes. Napoles claimed that Abad told her about a P10-million project and showed her a Special Allotment Release Order (SARO) and explained what it was for. After their meeting, Napoles claimed that she handed P2 million to Abad and that when the Notice of Cash Allocation (NCA) was released, another P2 million was allegedly turned over to the then congressman. She claimed that Abad asked her if she had a non-government organization (NGO) and because she had none, “he told me he would take care of it.” Napoles said that Abad used the Batanes Electric Cooperative to implement the project. “After some time, he returned the P4 million I gave him with an added P2 million more. That is when I started to transact using the PDAF,” Napoles said.
Posted on: Tue, 27 May 2014 00:29:52 +0000
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