Senator Leila de Lima said she is drafting a resolution for a Senate inquiry on the government’s impending deals with Chinese firms that have history of fraud.
“It’s a work in progress, but we hope to file it by next week,” De Lima said.
De Lima said the inquiry aims to find out whether the projects would entail “tied loans” where contractors choose predetermined suppliers without public bidding.
“We expect these [projects] to be foreign-funded by China, and most likely the contractors and suppliers in these projects would also be Chinese firms. So these could involve tied loans,” she said.
“We have to scrutinize that,” added the former Justice secretary.
Subsidiaries of the China Communication Construction Co., a firm barred by the World Bank for fraudulent practices in 2011, have taken initial steps toward securing contracts for major infrastructure projects under the Duterte administration.