FALSE: Morales, Hontiveros sentenced to life in prison for PhilHealth corruption

Claim:

Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) president and chief executive officer Ricardo Morales and Senator Risa Hontiveros will be imprisoned for stealing billions of pesos from the state health insurer.

Facebook page Pinoy Online Trends TV uploaded a video on August 8 titled: “EXCLUSIVE- MORALES at HONTIVEROS MAKUKULONG NA dahil sa PAGNANAKAW ng BILYONG PONDO ng PHILHEALTH-!!” (Exclusive: Morales and Hontiveros will now be imprisoned for stealing billions of funds from PhilHealth!) The video was 4 minutes and 40 seconds long.

YouTube channel Showbiz Fanaticz originally uploaded the video on August 8. For the most part, the video read out an article by the Philippine Daily Inquirer while a montage of photos of former president Benigno Aquino III, Morales, and Hontiveros appeared on-screen.

Claim Check, Facebook’s monitoring tool, flagged Pinoy Online Trends TV’s post for fact checkers to verify. It was reported 17 times for possibly containing false information.

As of writing, Pinoy Online Trends TV’s post on Facebook had over 256,000 views, 4,000 shares, 2,300 comments, and 10,000 reactions. The YouTube video had 190,928 views.

Rating: FALSE

The facts:

Investigations into PhilHealth conducted by Congress and the task force led by the Department of Justice (DOJ) are still ongoing as of August 19, almost two weeks after the video was uploaded both on YouTube and Facebook. On August 5, the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission recommended the firing or filing of cases against 36 officials, but refused to identify who they were.

The Inquirer article that was used by the video as a source did not mention Hontiveros, Aquino, or the possibility of life imprisonment for them. The article was instead about President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra to organize a task force that will conduct a separate probe into the PhilHealth mess.

Moreover, the content of the video itself did not support its claim that Hontiveros and Morales will now be imprisoned for stealing billions. It only said that whoever found to be guilty of pocketing funds would be sentenced to life in prison.

The investigations started after resigned anti-fraud official Thorrsson Montes Keith said its executives misspent and stole P15 billion from PhilHealth. Congress held its first hearing on August 4, while the task force led by the DOJ conducted its first hearing on August 14. (READ: Gov’t task force also uncovers alleged rampant corruption in PhilHealth)

Rappler debunked a similar claim on August 12 that said Hontiveros is “confirmed” to have stolen P15 billion from PhilHealth. Before that, there were also false claims that the Commission on Audit ordered Hontiveros to return illegal PhilHealth bonuses, and that the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption filed complaints against her for stealing PhilHealth funds.

There were also previous video uploads by YouTube channel Showbiz Fanaticz that were rated false by Rappler in the past. Among them were a video uploaded in July that wrongly said the Supreme Court had junked ABS-CBN’s franchise renewal, and another uploaded in June that falsely claimed Time magazine honored Duterte. – Pauline Macaraeg/Rappler.com

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