A must-audit of pandemic funds

THE P10-billion Napoles scam, the biggest pork-barrel thievery in congressional history, was essentially a story of recklessness and hubris. Senators and congressmen who acted as if they were beyond the reach of procurement laws simply traded their park barrel allocations, officially called SARO, for cash.

Dummy entities (mostly farm organizations and cooperatives with Orwellian-sounding names) hastily formed by the group of Janet Lim-Napoles fronted as beneficiaries of the pork-barrel funds. After vacuuming up the SARO proceeds, Napoles and her group lined the pockets of senators and congressmen with cash, a brazen SAROfor-cash exchange that has never been done in the long and tainted history of congressional corruption.