Press Release
January 21, 2007

LACSON WANTS EXPLANATION ON INVERTED BOOKS

At least 60,000 elementary textbooks scheduled for delivery later this year have been found to contain inverted pages, Sen. Panfilo Lacson bared Sunday.

Lacson said he received copies of the defective textbooks, which were supplied by a printer allied with controversial Vibal Publishing Group.

Ngayon naglalabasan baligtad na libro. Baligtad ang pahina, at least 60,000 copies ang baligtad. Lima o anim na libro ang may diprensya, e 60,000 yan lang natuklasan (Before, it was a question of contracts going out to a single group of publishers. Now it turns out the product is defective. At least five to six books were found to have defects and we have initially found defects in at least 60,000 copies), he said in an interview on dzXL radio.

Worse, he said the printer appeared to be based abroad. Ang problema iniimprenta sa abroad. Anong malay nila sa salitang Tagalog (The books were printed abroad. What do the foreign printers know about Tagalog)? he said.

He said the printing contract for the said textbooks may be automatically rescinded if further investigation finds 15 percent of the textbooks are defective.

Lacson said he will likely include this information in the Senate probe into the granting of textbook publishing contracts to Vibal and companies allied with it.

Aside from representatives of Vibal and its connected companies, the Senate will also summon for questioning officials of the budget and education departments.

Others to be invited in the investigation include bidders who claimed they won the bidding but were not awarded the contract.

Kung walang kalokohan okay na rin pero bakit ang nananalo isang grupo lang (If the probe finds there was no irregularity, so be it. But we want to know why one group has virtually monopolized the contracts), he said.

Earlier, Lacson called for an investigation into the textbook scam after noting that Vibal and its allies were granted a lions share of the contracts despite being disqualified.

He lamented that despite the disqualification of Vibal and its allies by the interagency bids and awards committee (IABAC), the World Bank that funded the textbook project chose to ignore the finding and awarded the contract to Vibal.

Lacson pointed out that while the WB funds the procurement of the textbooks, the Philippine government also has to spend for the textbooks through a counterpart fund.

Sobrang lakas ng Vibal. Na-violate na natin mismo sariling procurement act. Nakialam ang country representative ng World Bank. They went over the head of DepEd and DBM. Saan ka nakakita ng dayuhan na walang pakialam sa batas ng ating bansa, in spite of findings of the IABAC of DBM and DepEd. (Vibal is so well-connected. They violated our laws, aided by the World Banks country representative. Where else can you see a WB representative going over the heads of the DBM and DepEd, whose findings indicated Vibal should be disqualified)? he said.

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