Government suspends Cavitex toll hike

Subsidiaries of Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC) are set to  file arbitration cases against the government over its inaction on pending petitions for toll-fee adjustments, in gross violation of their separate concession deals with Malacañang.

Mall near Cavitex

In a recent forum, MPIC President-CEO Jose Ma. Lim said the conglomerate might initiate arbitration proceedings against the government as a last resort over the long-delayed toll-rate petitions by the Manila North Tollways Corp. (MNTC) and the Cavitex Infrastructure Corp. (CIC). MNTC and CIC respectively operate the North Luzon Expressway (Nlex) and the Cavite Expressway (Cavitex).

House near Cavitex

Lim said the government’s failure to honor its contracts with MNTC and CIC affects the competitiveness of MPIC’s participation in major infrastructure auctions under the Public-Private Partnership Program.

MPIC said the continued freeze on toll-rate increases is affecting the financial viability of its infrastructure projects because MNTC has four years’ worth of inflation adjustments pending for Nlex, while CIC has six years of inflation adjustments for Cavitex, equivalent to 19 percent and 23 percent, respectively.

“These inflation adjustments are embedded in the concession agreements, but getting the regulator to act on our applications has been a futile exercise,” Lim said. “In order to enforce our rights, we have issued a formal demand that may end up in an arbitration with the regulator.”

The regulator in this case is the Toll Regulatory Board (TRB),  which has rejected the MNTC petition to claim from the government about P2.4 billion in foregone revenues.

“We have a provision in our concession agreement that the government would adjust the toll rates in accordance to the contract,” Franco said. “Pursuant to the provisions of the contract, we were just claiming from government lost revenues—that was rejected by the TRB.”

“We are technically on the mandatory amicable settlement stage after which we will go to mediation. Arbitration will come after,”  Franco said. “We want to see what progress they will generate from their toll-rate review process.”

Source: Business Mirror

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Thousands Still Homeless after Yolanda

TWO years after super-typhoon Yolanda devastated Eastern and Central Visayas in 2013, only 16,544 housing units out of 205,128 targeted for the typhoon victims – very much less than one-tenth – have been completed, the House of Representatives was informed at a hearing the other day.

The principal reason, the Pag ibig Loans said, was that less than half of the P61.2 billion earmarked for the undertaking had been released by the national government. The amount released was P26.9 billion, out of the total P61.2-billion budget for the project.

Funding was only part of the problem. The other part was delay caused by difficulties in purchasing land for the housing projects. This in turn was blamed on conflicting presidential directives on safety zones, unsafe zones, and no-dwelling zones, governing the sites for the projects.

The NHA officials said they hope to complete the 205,128 housing units by 2017, but Rep. Rodel Botocabe, chairman of the House Special Committee on Climate Change, said that at the rate the work is proceeding, that deadline won’t be met.

The Senate Committee on Planning, Housing, and Resettlement headed by Sen. JV Ejercito had also met to look into the issue. He said he understood the problems of the NHA, principally because of the funding. He appealed to the heads of the NHA and the other government agencies and officials involved in the typhoon rehabilitation program to consider the feelings of the survivors – for whom every day remains a struggle for survival – and to do everything possible to speed things up.

The Yolanda housing problem is actually only a small part of the overall housing shortage in the country where, according to the Chamber of Real Estate and Retailers Associations (CREBA), some 5.5 million families are still homeless. It expects the shortage to balloon to 6.5 million by 2030. But that calls for a separate undertaking that will take hundreds of billions of pesos and an extended period of time. The next administration can perhaps draw up a program for this.

Today, we must concentrate on the more immediate need to help the victims of super-typhoon Yolanda. It has been two years since over 6,000 people were killed in that calamity and thousands of families lost their homes and their livelihood. The plans to rebuild their homes were approved long ago. All possible means must be taken to complete them and end the ordeal of the homeless victims.

Source: Tempo.com

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Cybercrime Law brings Precedent-Setting Case

     

THE country’s newly minted Cybercrime Law may soon be tested. Word on the street is that a mass housing developer is contemplating filing online libel charges against those behind what it calls “vicious Internet and social media attacks” on its projects.

While the developer—Pro-Friends—has yet to file what could be an important precedent-setting case against those using Internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to disparage it, the firm has already set the ball in motion.

Pro-Friends, in fact, won round one of its effort to combat a “syndicated effort” to destroy its reputation when the Regional Trial Court of Mandaluyong City issued a warrant for the arrest of several persons for grave slander and oral defamation.

Interestingly, one Biz Buzz source pointed out that there’s a force associated with the family of a realtor-politician behind the concerted attacks on Pro-Friends, so business rivalry could be the root of this issue.

If this is true, to whom does the hidden hand behind the defamatory campaign against Pro-Friends belong?

In fact, what Pro-Friends calls a “demolition job” against it has been going on for sometime now. The property firm believes it isn’t a spontaneous outpouring of protest by disgruntled clients, but rather a “well-funded and orchestrated by unseen hands who want to run the property development company to the ground so they can have a monopoly of the market.”

“The black propaganda campaign has been stretched by hiring ‘professional protesters’ to mount lightning mass actions complete with placards carrying libelous slogans against Pro-Friends,” said one source familiar with the reality firm’s side of the issue.

If rumors are to be believed, this developer politician has even used his political power to initiate investigations in both houses of Congress to pressure Pro-Friends, supposedly in a bid to cripple its marketing program—all while the politician’s firm pirated key marketing people of the beleaguered real estate firm to work in his own.

Luckily for Pro-Friends, it was thrown a lifeline and a vote of confidence by GT Capital through a capital infusion of P7.24 billion, with the announced interest to acquire a controlling 51-percent stake in three years. 

Source: Business Inquirer

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