Graft charges slapped vs Bulacan mayor

The mayor of San Miguel town in Bulacan was charged with two counts of graft before the Sandiganbayan over allegations that he extorted road fees from cargo truck drivers. Constantino Pascual, president and chairman of the Rosemoor Mining and Development Corp., accused Mayor Edmundo Jose Buencamino of charging P1,000 for "pass way fees" each time the firm's trucks passed municipal roads. Unwilling to compromise regular delivery operations, the drivers began paying the amount starting July 23, 2004. Pascual alleged that the road charges cost the company an average of P7,000 for each day of operation, since the trucks pass by San Miguel's roads about seven times a day. He also noted that fee collectors merely issued temporary receipts. The collections only stopped, Pascual alleged, after two of Rosemoor’s trucks were impounded over the supposed non-payment of the fees. The complainant said he asked the San Miguel Treasurer’s Office about the collections, but found that the money was never remitted to the municipal board. Pascual supposedly learned from the same office that collecting the "pass way fees" was illegal. For his part, however, Buencamino attested in his affidavit that he never knew that the collection of such fees was already abolished. He presented four receipts to show that the money went to the public treasury. Under the Local Government Code, only the provincial government was the only body allowed to collect fees on sand, gravel and quarry resources, graft investigators noted. They also said "it was highly improbable" that the temporary receipts given to Rosemoor carried successive numbers although these were supposedly issued over a period of 16 days. "This only shows that official receipts allegedly issued to the mining operators were just manufactured," the resolution read.-GMANews.TV