Poor collection, non payment of huge loans: Coop execs in hot water

By Jose B. Perez, Editor PILI, Camarines Sur --- A multi-purpose cooperative within a state university here, despite its having disposed of millions of pesos in credit loans to its members, appears to be on the verge of collapse because of non-payment, if not poor collection of payment for such loans. What is worse is that because the big and yet delinquent borrowers who are coop officers and at the same time high officials of the Central Bicol State University for Agriculture (CBSUA) themselves, they stand to be liable for alleged violation of Section 2 of R.A. 6713 for violation of the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees, to Uphold the Time-Honored Principle of Public Office Being a Public Trust unless immediate payments for the overdue loans are made. This came to the fore after a private investor, an OFW who begged not to disclose his name at the moment, complained that for several months or over a year now, the coop has failed to remit him the dividends he should be receiving from the coop for the over a million pesos cash he invested on the multi-purpose coop. The money he invested, he said, was part of his savings while working abroad while the other part was from the retirement benefits of his mother, a former teacher herself. The Central Bicol State University of Agriculture Multi-Purpose Cooperative, whose office is located within the university campus in Bgy. San Jose here, a close-type cooperative that has been in existence for over 50 years now has as its members the faculty and regular members of the Central Bicol State University for Agriculture. The coop’s manager, Epifanio Jumao-As, Jr. admitted before this reporter that the coop is encountering problems on payment collection among the borrower coop members that contributed to the high delinquency rate for the coop. A copy of the letter by Jumao-As dated as early as December 8, 2017 seeking help from the Civil Service Commission in Quezon City to intervene in making the borrowers, being civil service employees themselves, to settle their obligations to avoid “future litigation” show that the biggest borrowers are the top officers of the coop themselves whose unpaid loans stand at a low of P292, 524.46 and high of P2,216,576.92 as of November 30, 2017. What is also doubly scandalous is that these top officials, as among the top three borrowers in terms of unpaid loans, have also their spouses having secured loans at the same coop by as much as P1.17M! These top borrowers, whose names this paper will identify at the proper time when circumstances allow, are a former coop manager, a former coop audit chair, former coop audit member, and are currently holding high positions in the state university. The coop manager disclosed that there has been effort to ask the help of then CBSUA President Gina Bordado in collecting the amount to which the latter responded by ordering the university cashier and payroll department to enforce salary deductions on the named borrowers as provided for in the authority to deduct document that was signed in the first place between the coop and the loan borrower. But lo and behold! No such deduction was enforced which made the former CBSUA president’s strict order ignored and unheeded. And that’s a mystery that this reporter-editor hopes to uncover in the succeeding issues of this paper.