The Office of the Vice President (OVP) stood by Vice President Sara Duterte’s use of 433 security personnel in 2022, and stressed that comparisons with former vice presidents are “absurd” and “completely lacking basis.”
Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte (OVP photo)
In a statement on Sunday, Sept. 3, the OVP claimed that the Commission on Audit (COA) “found no adverse findings on the creation of the Vice Presidential Security and Protection Group (VPSPG).”
“The deployment of VPSPG personnel largely depends on the assessment of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP). The OVP remains grateful to the AFP and PNP for supporting the VPSPG and OVP,” the statement read.
“Comparisons between Vice President Sara Duterte and the security personnel of former Vice Presidents are absurd and completely lacking basis,” it added.
This came after the latest COA audit report showed that Duterte’s office had a 455-percent increase in its security and protection in 2022 compared to the 78 detailed military personnel under former vice president Leni Robredo in 2021.
Of the 683 personnel under its manpower roster for the year, 63 percent or 433 individuals were part of the VPSPG. This translated to six out of every 10 OVP personnel.
The OVP, however, argued that the use of the security personnel stemmed from Duterte’s numerous engagement as the second-highest elected official of the country, as well as the secretary of the Department of Education (DepEd), co-vice chairperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), and the president of the Southeast Asia Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO).
Based on the chart provided by the OVP, the Vice President had a total of 252 engagements from July to December 2022, 93 from January to March 2023, 118 from April to June 2023, and 95 from July to Aug. 2023.
The VPSPG was created by Duterte in June 2022 for the vice president to have “a group independent from the Presidential Security Group (PSG).”
“The VPSPG will wholly provide all future Philippine Vice Presidents with necessary security and protection, a fundamental task that it will inevitably perform even when the Vice President and the President face the misfortune of having a relationship strained or broken by political differences - a troubling situation we have seen during the past administration,” the OVP said.
Robredo and Duterte’s father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, had a tumultuous relationship owing to the former’s criticisms of his administration’s bloody war on drugs and pandemic policies.