If you’re a regular MRT 3 passenger, you must be familiar with the sinking feeling in the stomach that train passengers are getting more and more often these days, after the latest stories about trains decoupling, passengers having to walk on the rails, the woman who fell and lost her arm, the “black box” that went missing, and more than half the cars now out of commission.
All these horror stories can be traced back to the misbegotten decision by the PNoy administration to replace Japan’s venerable Sumitomo as maintenance contractor, with a misbegotten Korean-Philippine joint venture named BURI. These are the guys who would buy essential train parts from local chop-chop stores and then bill government for them at original European supplier prices.
Well, the long arm of Duterte justice has finally caught up with all those jokers under PNot. They’re now facing the next best thing to “tokhang”—being charged with plunder for awarding the P3.8-billion maintenance contract to BURI when they were still members of the government procurement policy board, thereby turning this and other similar contracts into a “bottomless cash cow.”
The defendants are led by then-DoTC Secretary Mar Roxas and include his successor Joseph Abaya and seven other former Cabinet members, most of whom were also members of the Liberal Party (then headed by Abaya as party president). These gentlemen share in the culpability for the mess at MRT 3.
I know, I know; these guys will plead that they were just doing their duty. But they should have said the same thing on behalf of GMA—especially those among them who used to work for her: Roxas, Abad, and Purisima—when Mrs Arroyo was jailed for nearly six years for likewise just doing her duty by affixing her marginal notation “OK” on a PCSO board resolution that she was otherwise not involved with at all, neither during the board deliberations nor in the subsequent execution of the resolution.
Do I see the noose tightening around the bald head of a certain Asperger’s-challenged former president? The palms of my hand are already turning red from rubbing together in glee.
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The noose should also be tightened around the private individuals who collaborated in these government shenanigans—like one Marlo de la Cruz in the MRT 3 case, who’s been described as a top LP political operator.
Another one of Mar Roxas’ operators who may deserve a long vacation in the hoosegow is a certain Francis Eric Gutierrez, owner of SR Metals Inc (SRMI), a nickel mining company in Agusan del Norte.
A top campaign financier of Roxas during the last elections, Gutierrez was cited by no less than President Duterte himself, right after he took office last year, for abusing SRMI’s mining tax exemptions, not only to evade paying taxes, but also to despoil the environment through abusive mining practices.
Now it appears that Gutierrez and his business partner, Caloocan City Rep Edgar Erice, another LP stalwart, may also have committed forgery and swindled a hapless small miner, on their way to earning billions of pesos from over-mining.
The small miner, one Rodney Basiana, has complained to the Surigao City prosecutor that Gutierrez and Erice falsified public documents in order to assert their ownership over an 81-hectare mining property in Tubay, Agusan del Norte, which Basiana says is actually covered by his mining claim.
Basiana says he properly filed his mining application over the Tubay property in July 1997. Many years later, in October 2005, he assigned his mining application to SRMI, the Gutierrez-Erice company, as consideration for the promise of receiving 5 percent of future mining revenues from Tubay.
SRMI went on to strip the property and earn oodles and oodles of money. Testifying before the Senate in 2012, Gutierrez admitted that his company grossed some P2.8 billion from nickel sales to China But he also had to admit that his company “over-mined” by 1.8 million tons, since small miners are limited to extracting only 50,000 tons a year.
Now, did Basiana get his 5 percent from all this moolah? Not a cent, he says. And the reason he says he was left out in the cold is because Gutierrez and Erice claimed that it was really SRMI that filed the mining application in July 1997—even if the company was registered with the SEC only in May 2005!
So what does that make the mining claim documents that Gutierrez has been waving around? According to Basiana, nothing but forgeries.
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Was the payment of 5 percent of revenues to Basiana really that onerous to Gutierrez ? If it was, I’m sure people would love to hear why. Mine mine mine, indeed.
Was the over-mining of 1.8 million tons really necessary in order to satisfy Gutierrez’ profit expectations? That would be a great story to hear, too.
And why was Congressman Erice, a highly visible stalwart of the ruling party at the time, getting himself involved in a shady deal like this? Didn’t he fear the ire of his incorruptible party chief President PNoy? Or was all that anti-corruption talk just for show?
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.