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By HERBIE GOMEZ
Editor in chief

FORMER mayor Constantino Jaraula has revealed that the contractor of city hall’s controversial P50-million telephone project for 17 rural villages asked to be paid some P19 million more despite technical issues that were not addressed.

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“I refused to pay them. I told them to fix the problem first,” Jaraula told the Gold Star Daily. Jaraula called up this paper on Friday to clarify that he never ordered an investigation into the project undertaken by the Supplier-Contractor Networking Telecommunications (Scantel). He said what he did was form a technical team to “verify” if the Scantel phones were functional or not.

“The team reported that it was functional in 12 of the 17 barangays. There were five barangays where it was not functioning. And so I told them to fix it first,” said Jaraula.

He said Scantel had to transfer a transmitter from Malasag in Cugman to Manticao town in Misamis Oriental. “While that improved the signal, we saw the same problems.”

Jaraula stepped down from city hall in 2010 or three years later without the problem getting fixed. He said the project was never turned over during his three-year office term, and city hall never released any payment to Scantel during his watch.

But city hall did pay Scantel some P31.5 million in tranches before Jaraula’s election as mayor in 2007.

State auditors questioned the project’s defects as well as the city hall-Scantel deal itself, and issued a notice that disallowed city hall from releasing payments. Late last year, the Commission on Audit (COA) en banc upheld the ruling to make former mayor Vicente Emano and at least 21 other present and former city hall officials return the money paid to Scantel, a decision questioned by Emano’s lawyer Francis Ku.

Jaraula said he could not answer why city hall contracted Scantel for a multimillion-peso project that provided only direct phone links between the barangay halls and city hall when cellphones that were already available at that time would have been more practical and much cheaper.

He said the Scantel system was not meant for commercial or residential use, and was intended only to provide a direct two-way communication link between the barangay halls and city hall.

The P31.5 million bagged by Scantel would have been enough to buy some 63,000 pre-paid cellcards at P500 each that were already available when the project started in 2003. For each of the 17 rural barangays, that would have meant a P500-cellphone load daily for 10 years.

“I cannot answer for that project,” Jaraula said.

Later, Jaraula sent this paper this text message: “I just recalled that most of the 17 barangays covered by Scantel had none or very unreliable access by either Globe or Smart at that time.”

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