Fraud tradition

Every six years, this country revels in this comedy skit that happens after every presidential election: the rush of hangers-on to get positions in the new administration.

According to our mole in the Duterte camp, the incoming administration could not escape our proud tradition of pestering from governmental parasites.

In fact, lobbying for juicy jobs in the next administration intensified early, with leeches attaching themselves to Davao City just a day after the elections.

Proof: The better hotels were fully booked!

And so the presumptive new President, Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, aka Duterte Harley, which should not be mistaken for the fictional character Dirty Harry, became rather scarce in the past few days, even in his own hometown.

But of course, the obsequiousness would have to extend to the business sector, with shouts of “bravo” coming even from some teeny executives, extolling the supposed “economic agenda” of the next administration like it was redemption day.

True—nobody in the Duterte camp really tackled his economic program during the campaign.

That was perhaps the reason why his so-called transition team worked overtime, hurrying his eight-point broad-strokes economic agenda, publicizing it in just two days after the outcome of the election became irreversible.

Really now, who could argue against an economic program that would focus on infrastructure, education, agriculture, taxation and poverty—what with the usual high in business at this time, the expected euphoria over the coming of the new administration?

Perhaps to dress up the agenda a bit, the Dutertistas nevertheless relied on a man already prominent in business circles, Carlos Dominguez, who served as agriculture secretary and environment secretary under Tita Cory.

According to our mole, Dominguez was the closest confidante of Duterte Harley throughout the campaign, with the rank of “captain” now tagged on him as part of the incoming economic team.

Even with his management skills honed in agri-business at an early age in the 1970s, Dominguez nevertheless moved to banking and finance in the early ’80s when he became president of the BPI Agricultural Development Bank.

At that time, the banking system groped for expertise in agri-business, and the BPI group reasoned that, rather than teach farming to a banker, it would be easier to teach banking to a farmer—thus Dominguez.

Now, as they say in business, the devil would always be in the details of any economic program.

Really, it would all boil down to how Dominguez and company would put flesh to the skeleton that he presented last week to a highly expectant nation.

***

Despite the sound bites about radical change during the campaign, it would seem that the next administration would keep some of the projects initiated by our outgoing leader Benigno Simeon, aka BS—well, at least the few good ones.

Part of the broad eight-point economic agenda, for instance, was the target spending on infrastructure equivalent to 5 percent of the GDP, and one way to hit it would be to remove bottlenecks in the public-private partnership (PPP) program.

Nobody could deny that the PPP was one damn good program, started by the cute administration of Gloriaetta and strengthened by the outgoing Aquino (Part II) administration.

Unfortunately, like many of the worthy programs of our leader BS, his boys derailed the PPP somehow, somewhere, and so the question remains: Could the next administration finally get the PPP going full blast?

Most notable among the few PPP ventures that were started by our leader BS was the toll way linking the South Expressway with C-5 highway, thus covering the entire southern part of the so-called Mega Manila, the one called Cavitex C5 South Link Project.

It would be done by the joint venture between the Philippine Reclamation Authority (PRA) and Cavitex Infrastructure Corp. (CIC) owned by Metro Pacific Tollways Corp. (MPTC) of the MVP group of Manuel Pangilinan.

Estimated to cost P12 billion, the six-lane expressway could very be the most crucial PPP flagship project so far, mainly because of the fast development in southern Mega Manila.

And it was the first project of the MVP group where our leader BS himself attended the ground breaking ceremonies.

Buti na lang—MVP also attended the event, together with his top executives, such as MPTC president Rodrigo Franco and CIC president Luigi Bautista, who would be on top of the biggest road project under the outgoing administration.

Stretching almost eight kilometers, the six-lane toll way would finally link Parañaque, Las Piñas and Cavite directly to the major business districts in Makati and Taguig. Finally!

It would mean that tens of thousands of residents from the southern part of Mega Manila could go directly to areas served by the C-5 road, without passing through Edsa, decongesting traffic in this major thoroughfare.

The first phase of the Cavitex-C5 South Link is set to start this year, initially joining C5 and Merville subdivision in Parañaque with a new flyover, and the second phase set to begin next year, in turn connecting Merville with Cavitex.

Thus, the project will result in the faster movement of people and goods, bringing about economic activities that would create more jobs and help ease poverty in this country of lecherous position-seeking hangers-on.

***

It seems that interest in the Senate hearing regarding the alleged $81-million case of money laundering, involving the Jupiter branch of RCBC, the money exchange company Remit, and casino junket operators, has waned.

From what I gathered, the committee supposedly cancelled the next hearing.

And so the question will probably continue to hang: How did that kind of money get through the strict monitoring of SWIFT, which was actually the root cause of the trouble that we went through in this country.

SWIFT of course is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, providing the financial institutions all over the worldwide a means for secure digital transactions, such as bank-to-bank transfer of funds.

From what I have gathered, SWIFT recently notified its clients that its systems were never “compromised” in the heist of that $81 million from the central bank of Bangladesh.

SWIFT nevertheless wondered about the “prolonged silence from the user,” meaning the Bangladesh central bank, which thus created bad speculation regarding its systems.

SWIFT declared to its clients: “The security and integrity of our messaging services are not in question as a result of the reported incident…We sincerely regret that the impacted user has not been more forthcoming with any further information as to the details of this fraud.

“We have made it clear that the extended silence from the impacted user is unacceptable and poses risks to the community.”

In short, SWIFT wanted to know how such an intricate fraud could happen inside the Bangladesh central bank like it was traditional or something.