WHO WAS Virgie Torres brokering for when she went to the Bureau of Customs (BOC) Intelligence Group office on Aug. 20 to bring out 64 shipping containers of sugar smuggled from Thailand?
A Buzzard told us that the former Land Transportation Office chief went out of her way to visit the BOC to arrange a settlement with officials on behalf of her partners, a group of mainland Chinese who started in the sugar repacking and expanded into furniture imports.
This Chinese group started only a decade ago but it has grown to become the biggest supplier of repacked sugar to the country’s biggest supermarket chains.
The group has likewise parlayed their BOC connections to expand into the importation of cheap furniture imports. The group is now the biggest source of knocked-down furniture sold in major home retail and supermarket chains.
Surprisingly, our Buzzard tells us that the BOC has no import record or profile for this major importer of sugar and furniture imports.
No wonder the group wants to keep the Virgie Torres transaction hush-hush as it isn’t used to having its business tactics under intense public scrutiny. Gil Cabacungan
Insurance duopoly
AS THE accreditations for Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board’s insurance consortia led by UCPB General Insurance (with the Philippine Association Management Insurance or PAMI as its management company) and Allied Bankers Insurance Co. (with SCCI Management and Insurance Agency Corp. as its management company) are set to expire a month from now, one of these groups is moving to block the entry of other insurance providers intending to participate in the scheduled accreditation process.
The two consortia managed by PAMI and SCCI are accredited under LTFRB’s Personal Passenger Accident Insurance Program (PPAIP), which offers insurance policies to public utility vehicle (PUV) operators. A PUV operator can secure the required passenger insurance policy only from these accredited insurance consortia before he can register his unit with the LTO.
In trying to preserve this duopoly of issuing passenger insurance policies, one of the companies is questioning the board’s decision to retain the qualifications of the management company under the 2013 Instructions to Participants. The bidding for the PPAIP accreditation was actually scheduled last week, but was postponed to Oct. 21 to enable the board to evaluate all insurance providers.
Apparently, an LTFRB executive said to be in “close contact” with the complaining management company made substantial modifications to the 2013 terms of reference to favor the latter in its bid to renew its PPAIP accreditation. LTFRB is now looking into the issue as to why this executive authorized the publication and release of the Invitation to Participants without the board’s approval.
Will the LTFRB succeed in breaking up this duopoly or give in to pressure from this influential insurer? Daxim L. Lucas
Not running
DAVAO City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte is not the only prominent personality whose consistent denials that he is running for national office has fallen on deaf ears. We are, of course, talking about businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan.
But unlike Duterte, who filed his certificate of candidacy for Davao mayor, Pangilinan was not even in the Philippines by the Friday deadline. He was in Hong Kong for business.
“If anything, that proves I’m not running,” Pangilinan, also known by his initials MVP, said.
The influential businessman, correctly so, remained coy on which candidate he would support. Although it is not unusual for people in his position to support several, if not all candidates.
“My prayer is that the good Lord gives us the right President, whoever he or she might be,” was all MVP would say. Miguel R. Camus
Shooting the messenger
IF YOU ask Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima, everything’s looking up for the Philippine economy. Unfortunately, the local media would usually magnify the small shortcomings instead of the big victories.
“My suggestion is to read all the newspapers, read all the Internet sites. Then come up with the average because it’s hard to just make your decisions based on a press that can really exaggerate on the negative rather than on the positive,” the jet-setting Finance chief told foreign investors recently.
But Purisima admitted that it was not only media but also the business sector that had not-so-good things to say about the Aquino administration’s PPP program.
“In fact, some of our friends in the banking sector in the Philippines referred to our PPP program as a ‘PowerPoint presentation’,” he said.
Five years after the PPP program was launched, the government has already awarded the contracts for a grand total of … 10 projects.
We here at Biz Buzz would have also wanted to exaggerate the positive, the impressive PPP gains made by the government so far. But as a free and fair press, we’d say, there’s not much to boast of. Ben O. de Vera
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