Two associate justices may have opined that President Benigno Aquino III should answer for the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), but Malacañang said Friday that the majority ruling did not impute liability on anyone for the controversial spending mechanism.
“The government maintains that any interpretation regarding the DAP should be based solely on the main decision of the Supreme Court (SC),” Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr. said in a statement.
He added that the SC’s modified ruling on the DAP stated that “authors are presumed to have acted in good faith.”
In its modified decision, the SC allowed “the funding of projects, activities and programs that were not covered by any appropriation in the General Appropriations Act.”
Aside from this, the high court also said that only the DAP’s authors, not the proponents and implementors of the projects, could possibly be held liable for unconstitutional acts.
The majority ruling did not identify who the DAP’s authors were.
Quoting Abad, Coloma further said SC “upheld the application of the doctrine of operative fact, which re-states presumptions of good faith and regularity.”
The doctrine of operative fact would dictate that all the plans and projects that stemmed or benefitted from the DAP should not be undone even if acts and practices under it had been declared illegal, so long as they were implemented in good faith. —NB, GMA News
