(Photo grabbed from iOrbit News)
MABALACAT CITY – Former Mayor Marino Morales, dubbed as the longest-serving mayor in the country’s history via unusual quirk of events, asserted yesterday that all projects during his mayoral term up to 2017 were not anomalous.
“They’re all above board,” he said amid a directive from the Commission on Audit (COA) “disallowing” some P92 million alleged “ghost infrastructure projects” under Morales and asked him and his contractor either to return the amount to government coffers or appeal the case within six months.
The COA said the P92 million projects reported as accomplishment of the Morales administration were allegedly projects of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
Last Tuesday, current Mayor Cris Garbo’s camp filed with the Ombudsman plunder charges against Morales and other respondents regarding the case. This is on top of the COA directive issued in August last year.
But Morales said the plunder charge was “premature” as he noted that the COA had given him and other respondents six months within which to appeal the case.
While the COA directive was dated in August last year, Morales noted that his appeal has remained pending.
“The notice of disallowance is appealable within six months upon receipt of the order and last October, we filed our appeal memorandum which was within reglamentary period of the COA and it has remained still pending,” Morales said.
Morales is now running for vice mayor here, with current Vice Mayor Christian Halili as his mayoral tandem. The current mayor is running for reelection.
Morales had been mayor of this city for 22 years until the Commission on Elections (Comelec) unseated him in 2017 for breach of the three-year successive terms for local politicians.
Morales stepped down from his post after the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) served him a cease and desist order on June 19, 2017.
Mayor since 1995, Morales managed to get around the constitutional and Local Government Code limit of three consecutive terms for local officials as a result of quirks mostly arising from protests filed by his mayoral adversaries. The protests legally chopped his terms after his serving out almost his entire term, thus creating a short vacuum in his stints that entitled him to fresh three-year mandates.
