Court junks Garin plea to dismiss Dengvaxia cases

(UPDATE) THE Sandiganbayan’s Second Division rejected the appeal of former Health secretary Janette Garin to drop the charges against her related to the government’s purchase of Dengvaxia vaccines.

In a nine-page resolution promulgated on Wednesday, the court thumbed down Garin’s motion to quash or dismiss the case filed by the Office of the Ombudsman.

Rep. Janette Garin. Contributed Photo

Garin had contended that the facts charged did not constitute an offense, and that her right to speedy disposition of cases was violated.

The court ruled that the allegations in the charge sheets were sufficient.

It also said that Garin and her co-accused were charged under two separate charge sheets, each pertaining to only one offense.

“Considering the circumstances that attended the investigation of these cases — with originally 42 respondents who were all given the opportunity to answer the charges against them, and the complexities of the issues that required careful study and consideration of voluminous documents submitted in the course of the investigation — the Court finds that the length of time spent by both the DoJ [Department of Justice] and the Office of the Ombudsman before issuing the resolutions that culminated in the filing of the cases in court is reasonable and acceptable,” it said.

One of the cases involved the alleged illegal use of public funds. It was filed against Garin, former DoH undersecretary Kenneth Hartigan-Go, Maria Joyce Ducusin, the officer in charge-director at the DoH at the time material to the case, and former Philippine Children’s Medical Center executive director Julius Lecciones.

The case involved P3,556,155,900, which was supposed to have been sourced from the 2015 MPBF and the 2014 General Appropriations Act.

The amount was meant “to augment the budget of the DoH’s Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI),” according to the charge sheet.

Instead, it was “used to purchase Dengvaxia vaccines, which are not part of the EPI […],” the Ombudsman said.

The other case, for violation of Section 3(e) of the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, was filed against Garin, Hartigan-Go, Ducusin, Lecciones, and former DoH undersecretary Gerardo Bayugo.

The Ombudsman alleged that Garin, Hartigan-Go, Ducusin, Lecciones and Bayugo, “conspiring and confederating with one another, and acting in evident bad faith,” issued a Special Allotment Release Order that realigned the amount “for the procurement of Dengvaxia vaccines and eventual implementation of the School-Based Immunization Program.”

The SARO defied the mandate of Executive Order 49, series of 1993, DoH Administrative Order 2012-0023, 2012-0023-A “and other related issuances to the damage and prejudice of the government in the afore-stated amount,” it said.

In the same resolution, the Second Division threw out the consolidated motion to quash filed by Bayugo and Ducusin, the motion to quash by Lecciones, and the motion to dismiss by Hartigan-Go.

In a statement in 2023, Garin, now a congresswoman representing Iloilo, said her conscience was clear.