When whatever it is hits the fan, our principal brute in the Cabinet, Transportation and Communications Secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya, simply passes the blame to others.
For that seemed to be the rule in his turf, the anomaly ridden Department of Transportation and Communications, the DOTC, which, under Abaya, centralized in the head office all of the procurements of its various agencies.
In his blame-throwing frame of mind, Abaya revealed that the construction of MRT-7 line, owned by Universal LRT Corp. under the San Miguel group, would be delayed.
It was obviously his way of diverting the issue on the pathetic state of mass transit in Metro Manila, perhaps away from the DOTC and himself.
From what I heard, Abaya told news people covering the DOTC that MRT-7 would be delayed because the San Miguel group could not yet do the “financial closing.”
Really? San Miguel? With more than P35 billion in yearly cash flow, the biggest food conglomerate in the Asean could not secure the funding for a freaking light rail project, which would cost about P62 billion, for which the proponent would be allowed to recover in more than 30 years? San Miguel could not do that? Whoa!
As it turned out, however, the big time financiers of MRT-7 were ready, willing and able to provide funding for the project a long time ago.
It was just that some big unresolved issue stood in the way!
That would be the so-called common station at North Avenue in Quezon City, which would be the start of the line running all the way to San Jose del Monte in Bulacan, serving as one of its terminals.
The project has been more than 10 years in the making by now.
Under the Aquino (Part II) administration, the DOTC chose to delay the construction of the “common” station that would serve three lines: the LRT-1 (Edsa-Taft), the Edsa MRT and San Miguel’s MRT-7.
It seemed the DOTC wanted to move the location of the “common station,” grabbing it from the North Mall of the SM group and giving it to the Trinoma mall of the Ayala group.
In almost six years under our leader BS, the plan to build the “common station” remained just that—a freaking plan.
From what I gathered, the MRT-7 financiers wanted to wait for the decision of the government on the “common station,” because its location would be material to the design of MRT-7.
The design of course would be the main consideration in its costing and, thus, the funding it would need.
In case you did not notice, the one and only Abaya did the rounds of news outfits lately.
He obviously wanted to repel the loud calls from various sectors, asking our leader Benigno Simeon, aka BS, to fire him from the Cabinet—what with the DOTC wallowing in multi-billion peso anomalies.
Most prominent of them was the pathetic state of the Edsa MRT, despite the billions of pesos in maintenance contracts given out by the DOTC under Abaya.
His principal foe was Sen. Grace Poe-Llamanzares, who is topping the surveys among the candidates for president.
For the longest time, our leader BS tried to woo the senator to join his party, the Liberal Party, in which Abaya happened to be the president.
Perhaps politics only added color to the word war between Poe-Llamanzares and Abaya.
Based on news reports, the senator attacked Abaya by asking the Ombudsman to file cases against Abaya over the scandalous contracts for Edsa MRT.
Abaya got back with insinuations that the senator was a paid hack, claiming she just mouthed the propaganda lines of MRT Holdings, the private builder of the line.
Really, it should now be the fault of others like Poe-Llamanzares, and perhaps the original builder, MRT Holdings, and the DOTC under our beloved Abaya actually did such a splendid job that the Edsa MRT almost turned into a junkyard?
The LRT-1 case would yet be another controversy.
The DOTC awarded the contract to operate LRT-1 to a consortium called LRMC, Light Rail Manila Corp., made up of the group of Manny Pangilinan, the Ayala conglomerate and foreign firm Macquarie.
In effect, the DOTC already gave to LRMC all the income of LRT-1, estimated at almost P6 million a day—or almost P2 billion a year—as a gift of the government in return for LRMC constructing a freaking 19-km extension of the line to Cavite.
Of course, the consortium has not yet built a single post along the extension line.
All of a sudden, reports came out that the DOTC had asked the Department of Budget and Management to release P7.5 billion to the DOTC for the LRT 1 project.
Why? Well, it was because the DOTC reportedly would use the money to pay the “penalty” it incurred in the contract with LRMC.
Abaya claimed some militant groups made up the request for the release of P7.5 billion—i.e. it was a big lie.
He could not deny however that the contract with LRMC could indeed penalize the government for its failure to fulfill provisions in the contract, no matter how one sided and onerous it was.
The problem was that neither the 2015 nor the 2016 budget had provisions for the payment of the penalty.
The Aquino (Part II) administration must find a way to go around the budget to hand over the reported P7.5 billion to the consortium.
Aha—the bright boys of our leader, BS, simply set aside P30 billion for what they called “contingent liabilities” in the PPP program which, of course, would include the payment of the penalty to the LRMC.
The money would come from the “unprogrammed lump sums” in the 2016 budget of the administration, which amounted to about P60 million.
But another rule said that, for the government to use the “unprogrammed” funds, it would have to realize a corresponding increase in revenue to cover the releases.
How the administration would go around this rule, should be another interesting DAP-like case.