Still no action on WB report of bid rigging

Published in The Philippine Star, Wednesday, December 19, 2007

It was, as Sen. Mar Roxas decried, “a huge national embarrassment.” But the World Bank’s discovery of bid rigging and consequent cancellation of $265 million in road construction loans is now a dead story. Malacañang blarney cleverly diverted attention from it. Allegedly it was all the Bank’s fault for imposing flawed bidding rules when the country’s laws were better. Forgotten now was the portion of the report that about 200 local officials had submitted false tenders.

It is true that the Bank is not always of high virtue or intelligence. Not only was its headman sacked last summer for giving undue benefits to a lover-subordinate. It was also caught in 2006 naively awarding three-fourths of a P3.5-billion textbook project to publishers and printers with the same blacklisted owners. But that should not be the end of the story in any discovery of fraud.

The $265 million is what’s left unspent. Over $120 million reportedly was earlier released for road repairs; there could’ve been bid riggers there too, like the 200 discovered later. The first and second batches of crooks need to be punished to set an example.

Public Works Sec. Hermogenes Ebdane supposedly has investigated the anomaly. Yet defying Senator Roxas’s request, he has not made public the report. Surely it is because the 200 mayors and governors are Palace pals.

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“What would drive anyone to do this?” conservationist Dodo Cu-Unjieng e-mailed along with sad photos from Dasmariñas Village, Makati. Twenty-nine kittens had been shot with an air pistol at pointblank range in their clinic cages. All bore multiple pellet wounds. Three were already dead when the subdivision guards discovered the misdeed early Sunday. Eleven more had to be euthanized when the vet ruled that their wounds were beyond repair. Of the 15 that endured the brutality, only a handful has a good chance to recover under intensive care. “Those that will survive will be traumatized,” Dodo wrote. “Blood was splattered all over the cages. The three kittens that died didn’t do so quickly. Evidently theirs were horrific, painful deaths.”

Dodo’s wife Nancy has been helping the homeowners association control the stray dog and cat population. The animals are captured and sent to her CARA Clinic or to other vets to be spayed or neutered. From there, the Cu-Unjiengs nurse the animals in their own home before returning them to the Dasma security office. They are temporarily kept in cages before release to the areas where they were found.

“Why would anyone mercilessly shoot animals in cages?” Dodo wrote. “They were in a storage area not frequented by residents; they couldn’t have been disturbing anyone.” What’s disturbing is that such a person is roaming around with an air gun.

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Also to the poll in which Filipinos judged Gloria Arroyo as the vilest of five past Presidents, Malacañang made a false claim. One storyteller gave as example of the admin’s anticorruption drive the conviction of Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia. That’s farthest from the truth.

From Oct. 2004 when I broke the story on the arrest of Garcia’s sons for bringing undeclared $100,000 cash into America, to Dec. 2005 when a court martial convicted him to two years in prison, the Palace never helped in the case. It was a chance for Arroyo to grandstand, as she is wont to do, by saying or doing something to stop the thievery by the military brass and help the foot soldiers. Yet she and her aides even seemed to be avoiding the issue of corruption in the uniformed services.

Malacañang’s unusual silence had something to do with Arroyo’s faulty “revolving door policy”. Then, as now, she would accommodate all senior generals to become her Armed Forces chief of staff, even though they would serve only three months or so. Some of the chiefs weren’t able to do much more than repainting the GHQ fence, but it was fine. She got their loyalty and they got heftier retirement packages. There wasn’t enough time to check on everything, especially the military’s money. That allowed Garcia as comptroller to run circles around five chiefs of staff while secretly amassing more than P300 million from a monthly pay of P26,000.

The Sandiganbayan is still trying Garcia for plunder and perjury. Then-Ombudsman Simeon Marcelo’s researchers sealed the case with Chief Prosecutor Dennis Villa-Ignacio’s litigators. Credit for deep investigative spadework should go to three colonels who prefer to remain anonymous. The only time Arroyo stepped in was to accept the military court’s sentence of two years’ hard labor. And that only meant not making Garcia do chores beneath a general’s dignity.

The Palace spin-doctor who now claims credit in nailing Garcia even tried to belittle my initial exposé. Maybe it was from habit of denying any misdeed by persons around the President, but he looked like he was siding with the general. Only later when more proof surfaced of fraud at the top and Malacañang allies in Congress asked for heads to roll, did he shut up.