Taxpayers in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) are urging the Office of the President and the Bangsamoro Parliament’s Office of the Speaker to investigate a series of allegedly anomalous rice procurement transactions worth P680 million by the Ministry of the Interior and Local Government (MILG) in 2024—transactions they believe may constitute plunder.
Copies of the complaint have also been submitted to the Senate and the Commission on Audit (COA).
The complainants, who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons, allege that the MILG transactions violated government procurement laws and lacked transparency and fiscal accountability.
At the center of the controversy is JB Pharma & Trade Center, a pharmaceutical distributor that, despite lacking expertise in food supply, was repeatedly awarded rice procurement contracts. The complainants claim that JB Pharma secured every contract, even when other bidders were deemed the Lowest Calculated and Responsive Bidders (LCRBs), raising serious concerns over the integrity of the selection process.
In one instance, they say the government lost P15 million by awarding a contract to JB Pharma over a qualified agricultural supplier that had submitted a lower bid.
The complainants also accused MILG of purchasing rice at significantly inflated prices—reportedly over P60 per kilo, while the prevailing market price at the time was only P45 per kilo. Such overpricing, they noted, falls under excessive spending as defined by COA regulations.
One particularly questionable transaction cited involved a supposed emergency purchase of rice and hygiene kits on July 24, 2024, amounting to P100.325 million. The purchase was allegedly charged to the 2023 MILG-READI Fund, despite the absence of a declared state of calamity to justify emergency procurement under Republic Act No. 9184. The deal was reportedly facilitated by Minister Sha Elijah Dumama-Alba’s husband, Salhiwardi Alba, who contracted JB Pharma for the supply.
According to the complaint, no actual delivery or distribution of goods occurred for this transaction. Instead, liquidation documents included the same small set of goods photographed from different angles to simulate fulfillment.
The complaint further alleges that the MILG routinely engages in “contract splitting”—the illegal practice of dividing a large procurement into smaller transactions below the P1 million threshold to avoid the public bidding requirement.
The taxpayers are now calling for a thorough investigation into what they describe as a deliberate effort to manipulate procurement processes, inflate costs, and funnel public funds to a single favored entity, all at the expense of transparency, competition, and public trust.