Breaktime
Mickey’s mouse
By Conrado Banal III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:08:00 07/15/2008
So, finally, the House of Representatives’ energy committee drops the contentious proposal to amend the Electric Power Industry Reform Act, a.k.a. EPIRA.
Now, the chairman of the committee is none other than Representative Juan Miguel Arroyo, who happens to be a son of the Grandma at the Palace.
From what I have gathered, Arroyo—the congressman—was instrumental in the committee’s complete turnaround on the EPIRA amendment.
Does it mean then that, as a policy, this administration is now giving its full support to the EPIRA, which the Grandma herself pushed for in Congress, in the first place?
It seems that way.
Well, the biggest excuse for tinkering with the EPIRA was its provision on the so-called open access, meaning, end-users can choose power suppliers, something like an open market for electricity.
Such a system should be good for businesses that needed a lot of power. You know, factories that use more than one megawatt!
Mikey Arroyo said amendments to the EPIRA would be “senseless” (his word), because everybody in the power business has already agreed to speed up the implementation of open access.
Thus, all the other proposed amendments to the EPIRA, the House energy committee will pass on to the Joint Congressional Power Commission.
That, according to Mikey, is a short cut. It does away with all the long debates in the House, for one. Oh, and also all the intense lobbying!
* * *
Anyway, Mikey Arroyo’s pronouncement should be good news for the business community.
After all, the move to amend the EPIRA has already elicited negative reactions from investors, particularly the foreign groups.
In a way, by amending the EPIRA even before its provisions could be fully implemented, this country is changing the rules in the middle of the game—again.
That can only be expected to drive away foreign investors. For instance, the best friends of Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, who are members of the Joint Foreign Chambers, said that the EPIRA issue is scaring away investors.
Last year, foreign direct investments in this country were down to $2.4 billion, which was pathetic compared to, say, Vietnam which attracted at least $9 billion.
Besides, business groups suspected all along that all the noise about the EPIRA had something to do with the government firm National Power Corp., or Napocor—and the powerful mafia in it.
Under the EPIRA, Napocor must privatize at least 70 percent of its generating plants in Luzon and the Visayas. It also must give up live purchase contracts from private power plants. The Korean-owned ones, for instance!
Those are the PPAs, the power purchase agreements, made famous by the Napocor mafia during the time of former President Fidel Ramos.
It seems to the business groups that the Napocor mafia is missing the good old days of huge kickbacks from such contracts. Those mice!
Well, at least for now, based on the word from Mickey Arroyo, the move to amend the EPIRA is officially dead.
But that was a close one.
* * *
Good news for vehicle owners: The Department of Transportation and Communications (DoTC) approved the car insurance proposal of the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS).
It covers the so-called CTPL, the compulsory third-party liability, which the Land Transportation Office (LTO) requires for motor vehicle registration.
The GSIS just signed an agreement with the DoTC and the Insurance Commission, in effect authorizing the pension fund to handle the CTPL insurance of motor vehicles all over the country.
It will come out cheaper for the vehicle owners. For instance, for a private vehicle, the GSIS will charge only P575, compared with the P900 charged by present CTPL providers. For utility vehicles, including jeepneys, the CTPL cost under the GSIS will come up to only P575, compared with P950. Light truck CTPLs will amount to P355 as against P625. Motorcycles will cost P265 versus P350.
The GSIS says that it is set to implement its CTPL scheme within this month.
Under the plan, the GSIS is to tap some 38 insurance and re-insurance companies for its new CTPL system.
So there goes what the fly-by-night CTPL providers are saying about the GSIS scheme, that the pension fund will monopolize the business.
The exact opposite is true: The GSIS scheme will eliminate the “fake” CTPL providers that use CTPL certificates several times over—and at rather prohibitive costs to the motor vehicle owners.
I think that my mother will like that. Aside from the public’s getting the real thing at a lower price, the GSIS-provided CTPL can remove the bureaucratic red tape in the registration.
The CTPL payment will be automatically included in the registration process of the LTO, including the fee.
That should plug the leak in government revenues from CTPL premium payments, since the LTO—having received the fees directly from the public—will be in a position to remit the CTPL tax straight to the national coffers.
It is estimated that, from 2000 to 2007 alone, almost 40 million vehicles were registered with the LTO.
Guess what—only 17 million valid CTPLs were supposedly issued in those years.
That is how many “fake” CTPLs were issued to the public—some 22 million. The amount of taxes that the government failed to collect from those CTPLs could reach more than P2 billion.
That can pay for 2,000 classrooms already.
Previous columns:
Race to the finest - 06/24/2008
Horse raisin - 6/17/2008
Horse raisin - 17/06/2008
What’s up, duck? - 06/10/2008
Melting of the mind - 05/21/2008
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