47 lots worth P85M up for privatization

The government is selling 47 lots worth more than P85 million all over Luzon as part of its privatization program for the first quarter.

In a notice, the Privatization and Management Office said it would sell in February three lots in Tanay, Rizal; one in Quezon City; two in San Pedro, Laguna; two in Parañaque City; 18 in Daet and three in Labo, Camarines Norte; six in Pagbilao and four in Lucena City, and one lot in Lopez, Quezon.

The PMO will also auction off in March one lot in San Francisco, Quezon; three in Quezon City; one in Guiguinto, Bulacan; one in Marikina City and one in Tagaytay City.

The PMO said interested parties who have been issued the bidding package can start conducting due diligence on Feb. 6.

The highest qualified financial bid for each lots will still be subject to the approval of the interagency Privatization Council before the properties are awarded.

Last year, Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said the government was looking at bundling together small idle real estate properties in its privatization pipeline to make them more attractive to buyers.

“We have a range of assets, and we are spending an inordinate amount of time in the small stuff, because they are a lot. We have inherited from closed banks, bad assets, a number of [small] lots, like 100 square meters,” Dominguez said.

Dominguez said he had already instructed the PMO and Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. to instead dispose of these properties in packages starting the middle of this year.

“We are spending 80 percent of our manpower to generate 10 percent of our revenue, so why don’t we just bundle those small assets together and sell them as one to a group and use our time on the big ticket items?”

Included in the privatization pipeline are a number of mines in Davao and the Visayas regions, Dominguez said.
“They are big-ticket items that we are spending money on guarding the assets because we have so many small ones, we don’t have the focus on the large ones. I think taxpayer money is better spent on the big-ticket items,” he added.

He admitted though that some big-ticket properties were facing legal problems, delaying their sale.

As for the smaller assets in the pipeline of the PMO, chief Privatization Officer Gerard L. Chan had said that about P100 million worth would be disposed of in the first quarter of this year.