Gov’t to sell P98.3M assets

The government is selling within the first quarter P98.3 million in assets, most of them idle land properties in Luzon and Mindanao, to augment revenues.

The Privatization and Management Office (PMO) would dispose of 63 lots as well as a golf and country club membership, the Department of Finance (DOF), said in a statement Thursday, quoting Chief Privatization Officer Gerard L. Chan.

Among the land assets were 35 parcels of land of Peninsula Development Bank in Quezon City as well as Camarines Norte, Laguna and Quezon provinces, worth a minimum of P26.9 million; four commercial and residential lots of Selectra Electronics Corp. in Rizal worth P16 million; as well as two residential lots of Delta Motors Corp. in Paranaque City worth P6.1 million, the DOF said.

The PMO conducted biddings for these properties in February.

Auction

“The remaining assets set for bidding this month include two lots under the name of the Retired Servicemen Enterprises Inc. with a floor price of P2.5 million; seven parcels of land in Bulacan, Quezon City, Tagaytay, and Marikina under the Development Bank of Rizal with a combined value of P35.2 million will also be put on the auction block,” Chan said.

“Thirteen residential and agricultural parcels of land in General Santos City under the name of the Al-Amanah Islamic Investment Bank of the Philippines with a total floor price of P10.3 million and a membership share worth P1.2 million at the Canlubang Golf and Country Club under the name of Merchants Investment Corp. will also be sold in March this year,” Chan added.

Small properties

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 had told reporters.

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

Bundling

“I asked them: 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 really use our time to spend on the big ticket items? It’s better use of our time than chasing around appraisals for small lots. Let’s just bundle them all together and bid it out. Let the private sector deal with that if they are better than us,” Dominguez had said.

Included in the privatization pipeline, according to Dominguez, were a number of mines in Davao and the Visayas regions. “They are big-ticket items that we are spending money on guarding the asset because we have so many small ones, we don’t have the focus on the large ones ….,” he had said.

But Dominguez had admitted that for some big-ticket properties, there were also legal problems delaying their sale./lb