Binay milestones and controversies as housing czar

With his resignation from President Benigno Aquino III's Cabinet on Monday, Vice President Jejomar Binay will be stepping down as chairman of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC).

Binay accepted Aquino's offer to head the HUDCC, the agency created in 1986 by the president's mother, the late President Corazon Aquino, back in 2010.

The HUDCC was “to serve as the highest policy making body for housing and coordinate the activities of government housing agencies."

And according to Binay, the housing sector was able to provide direct housing assistance to nearly 582,000 low-income and informal settler families (ISFs) since he assumed leadership in the HUDCC in July 2010 until June 2014.

The housing projects had also injected some P200 million into the economy and generated more than 3.5 million jobs since Binay's assumption of the post, the HUDCC said in its 2014 mid-year report.

Meanwhile, as head of the Yolanda Resettlement Cluster, Binay had vowed to complete 120,000 housing units for families displaced by Typhoon Yolanda by the end of 2015.

Some P13.4 billion in government funds had been released by December 2014 for the construction of 46,129 housing units for Yolanda victims.

Pag-IBIG

In February, Binay reported that the Home Development Mutual (Pag-IBIG) Fund, one of the agencies under the HUDCC which Binay also chairs, achieved in 2014 its highest gross and net income in its 34-year history, at P30.68 billion and P16.22 billion, respectively.

He also said that Pag-IBIG’s total assets reached P376.09 billion which is 9.12 percent higher than the previous year.

Pag-IBIG also increased its membership to 14 million in May 2014 from 8.19 million in 2010.

However, in the series of Senate Blue Ribbon subcommittee hearings on the corruption allegations against Binay, the vice president's critic, Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, alleged that Pag-IBIG granted loans to four developers linked to Binay.

It was also under Binay's leadership when Globe Asiatique owner Delfin Lee was arrested over a P6.6-billion syndicated estafa case.

Lee is accused of using fake documents to secure billions in pesos' worth of loans for "ghost" borrowers.

Lee meanwhile bared an alleged attempt by Binay to extort P200 million from him for his estafa case to be quashed. — Kathrina Charmaine Alvarez/DVM, GMA News