THE chairman of the House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability on Wednesday said former Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. official Krizle Grace Mago asked to be released from the chamber’s protective custody.
In a news conference, DIWA Rep. Michael Aglipay said Mago left the House’s protective custody last Monday.
It was also on Monday when her bosses at Pharmally, Mohit and Twinkle Dargani, were brought to the Senate premises for detention after the Sergeant At Arms caught up with them in Davao City airport late Sunday as they were about to fly on a private chartered jet to Kuala Lumpur.
The siblings – Dargani is secretary and treasurer while Twinkle is president of Pharmally – were earlier cited in contempt for refusing to submit their firm’s financial documents as demanded by the Senate Blue Ribbon panel of Sen. Richard J. Gordon.
It was unclear where Mago went after leaving House custody, but before she sought House protection, she had been declared “missing” by Gordon when she stopped replying to Blue Ribbon staff on the panel’s offer to take her into custody after she implicated Mohit in her Senate testimony – which she retracted.
“Mago wrote a letter to the leadership of the lower chamber last week saying she wanted to leave our custody, so we allowed her,” said Aglipay on Wednesday, by way of explaining why they let go of the controversial Pharmally officer.
On September 30, Mago requested for protective custody from the House after she went incommunicado following her statement in a Senate hearing that their company “swindled the government.”
However, Mago backtracked her statement, saying “it was a pressured response.” Mago has also told lawmakers that she is ready to face perjury cases for changing her testimonies on alleged overpricing of medical supplies and equipment for Covid-19 response.
“Regarding my previous statement that I believed we swindled the government, it was a pressured response. Given the level of pressure I was under and the rush of emotions associated with the allegations and my subsequent admission, I was not in the best frame of mind to think clearly,” she had said.
Mago earlier admitted before the Senate that the company had tampered with face shields supplied to the government by changing the expiry dates from 2020 to 2021.
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