By ELLEN TORDESILLAS
A COMMISSION on Elections executive who investigated the overpriced P690-million ballot secrecy folder contract bought for the May 2010 elections with OTC paper supply has been put on “floating” status.
Ferdinand Rafanan, director of the Comelec’s Law Department since June 2008, was not given any position after the Comelec commissioners, in an en banc decision on Aug. 2, reshuffled some offices in the agency.
Instead, he was designated to the Joint Department of Justice-Comelec Investigating committee, an ad hoc body created to investigate frauds in the 2004 and 2007 election.
Update: Rafanan removed from DOJ-Comelec probe team. Brillantes says he is “uncontrollable.”
“It’s constructive dismissal,” Rafanan said.
Ironically, Rafanan was replaced by lawyer Allen Francis Abaya , Director III of the Comelec Electoral Contests and Adjudication Department , who, together with Comelec Executive Director Jose Tolentino and other members of the Comelec Bids and Awards committee, were suspended for six months by the Ombudsman over the grossly overpriced secrecy folder.
Abaya and his colleagues returned to the Comelec after serving out their suspension.
Rafanan said his designation to the committee is not a “re-assignment.” A re-assignment, he said, would be to an equivalent existing unit of the same government agency. The DOJ-Comelec investigating committee does not fall in that category.
A re-assignment, he further said, should not diminish an employee’s rank, status and salary. “Definitely, my status has been diminished,” said Rafanan, who has the rank of Director IV.
Rafanan said he has written Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes, the commissioners and the Personnel Department that “he is not waiving his rights as permanently appointed Director IV of the Law Department as per appointment duly approved by the Civil Service Commission” even as he accepted membership in the ad hoc DOJ-Comelec committee.
Less than three weeks after Abaya replaced Rafanan in the Law Department, the Office of the Ombudsman found him guilty of “simple neglect of duty, simple misconduct and conduct prejudicial to the best interest of the service” still on the secrecy folders case.
He was ordered suspended for six months without pay. Also found guilty and suspended were Maria Lea Alarkon and Antonio Santella.
Cleared for insufficient evidence were Tolentino, Maria Norina Casingal and Martin Niedo.
Brillantes, in a TV interview, complained about the severity of the sentence on Abaya. He said it should have been only two weeks because it was just “simple neglect of duty.”
Rafanan said there have been issues in the Comelec where he had been straightforward in expressing his opinion about problems in the poll body’s implementation of its mandate of holding credible elections. One was the illegal extension of registration for the barangay elections which caused a delay in the preparation of that election. The delay caused non-holding of election in 6,000 barangays on election day. Comelec had to hold the elections three days after.
Rafanan said he has been getting pressure to clear high-ranking officials involved in election crimes.