Metro Pacific willing to give up bid for MRT

MANILA, Philippines—Infrastructure giant Metro Pacific Investments Corp. will withdraw its proposal to buy the Metro Rail Transit 3 train line if the government insists on bidding it out to find better offers.

MPIC chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan said the company was willing to stand down from its position that the MRT acquisition was a mere corporate buyout between private shareholders so as not to delay the train line’s overdue modernization.

“If they want to bid out the project, we will not object,” Pangilinan said at the sidelines of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.’s briefing Tuesday.

The MRT 3 project has been listed as a priority deal under the current administration’s Public-Private Partnership (PPP) scheme.

Under its proposal, the Pangilinan group offered to repay the MRT line’s $1.1 billion in loans to private shareholders, which were used to fund the system’s construction more than a decade ago.

MPIC also plans to spend another $300 million for the expansion of the MRT’s capacity to 700,000 passengers a day, from 350,000.

The Department of Transportation and Communications said it preferred to have a straight auction for the project, instead of just taking proposals from other groups to find one that can do better than MPIC. However, the DOTC has not yet thrown out MPIC’s proposal.

It currently costs the government about P7 billion a year to subsidize the MRT’s operations. The bulk of this amount is used for debt payment.