With public scrutiny intensifying over Defense Ministry spending, attention is now shifting inside the system itself; who approves the payments, and how? As scrutiny continues over payments made to the siblings of Minister Oscar Mira since 2020, Defense Minister Florencio Marin Junior is pointing to the process. He says finance officers and procurement professionals handle the vetting and approval, and the ministry relies on their expertise to process invoices and quotations. Now, amid the growing concern, the ministry has launched an internal review, putting its own payment procedures under the microscope.
On The Phone: Florencio Marin Jr., Minister of National Defense and Border Security
“If you notice, payments have been done by the financial officers. We are guided by the professionals how they do this. And at the ministry, the professionals tell me they process quotations and invoices based on how they are submitted, no? So we kinda rely on them to guide how the process is paid and well clearly there’s room for improvement and we will continue having the dialogue with finance to hope that we could get it improved, no.”
Shane Williams
“And have you reached out to the public officers responsible for such payments to find out exactly what is taking place and how they plan to improve?”
Florencio Marin Jr.
“We have had a conversation and right now the whole – again it is being run via for the Ministry of Finance that part. And so finance will guide us how we can improve the system and every – there’s always room for improvement. Every time we come up with a new system, there’s a new way to improve it and all that. So it – we’ll dialogue with finance how we move with that. I believe the BDF and the course card have been getting value for money.”
Florencio Marin Jr. was the substantive Minister of National Defense and Border Security during the time most of the leaked payments to Jenny Mira were made. Oscar Mira was Minister of State. Mira became Minister in 2025, the time period during which forty-four payments were made to Brian Mira for almost four hundred thousand dollars in one day.
Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.
Watch the full newscast here:
