GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc, The Philippine Star, Friday, May 9, 2008
Naghalo ang balat sa tinalupan, they’d say in Tagalog. Everyone every which way is joining the electricity fray. Sen. Miriam Santiago is to lead a joint Senate-House probe of Meralco’s “antitrust breaches.” Co-chair Rep. Mikey Arroyo rushes back from extended American holiday in time to summon the power distributor’s execs for Monday. Ally Sen. Joker Arroyo (not related) cautions Malacañang against seizing Meralco from the Lopez clan. Executive Sec. Ed Ermita and Presidential Counsel Sergio Apostol deny any such takeover. It’s only GSIS boss Winston Garcia with 33-percent shares who’s squeezing transparency out of Meralco, they chorus, and the Palace has nothing to do with it. Yet Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye butts in that the Palace is backing Garcia all the way. Sensing business unease with the admin harassing a private firm, Gov. Joey Salceda as Gloria Arroyo’s economic guru assures that the President intends no Meralco capture. But party mates led by Rep. Danny Suarez sneer that the Lopezes deserve whatever is about to hit them.
Mrs. Arroyo adds to the din with baffling, baseless remarks. First, she incites industrialists to help her force Meralco to match electricity rates in Visayas-Mindanao. Then she orders state-owned Napocor to cut by half its pass-on charge of generated electricity to Meralco. She also wonders aloud why electricity rates are soaring in
Mrs. Arroyo’s statements only frighten the businessmen she hoped to enlist. A President-led attack on the country’s biggest power firm means it’s open season on all other private enterprises. It also could hurt the bloc held by Garcia, consisting of mutual funds GSIS, SSS, Philhealth, and Pag-IBIG. Cutting Napocor rates would repeat the fiasco of 2002-2004, when Mrs. Arroyo similarly capped its rates. Napocor’s losses then ballooned to P1.2 trillion, a third of which came from the heady years, pulling down the peso and frazzling the fiscal situation. It had to take a hated 12-percent value-added tax to avert crisis. As for oil for generators being only a percent of
And that leads to Napocor’s main generator fuel: coal.
Yet, not one of the admin pols now ranting against power costs is about to look at the coal mess. It would be too embarrassing for the Palace. For, presidential appointees at Napocor routinely have been buying coal at overprice, for billion-peso kickbacks. Worse, the Napocor crooks appear to be reporting to a lawmaker closely tied to Malacañang.
In 2007 they filched P877.5 million from five 65,000-ton shipments from April to August. The modus operandi employed top-level deceit. Napocor simply declared a coal shortage and the need for emergency imports to avert blackouts. It tripped the Luzon grid to prove its point, and then called for bids on too short notice so no supplier could conform. To repair the bidding failure, Napocor was “forced” to negotiate directly with Australia’s Hunter Valley Coal Corp., thru local agent Glencore Far East Philippines AG. The agreed price was $84 a ton (at P50:$1), when the going rate in Australia then was $30.
Consumerists sued Napocor president Cyril del Callar for graft. Implicated were VP-Bidding Carlos Guadarrama and two other bigwigs.
The Ombudsman had yet to act on the charges when Napocor again invoked coal shortage early this year. It rushed to buy three 65,000-ton shiploads from
To pull the trick, Napocor always buys coal on emergency instead of storing up as told by the energy department. Notably, private generators Quezon Gas in
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