"Let Pagcor do its job."
"Let Pagcor do its job."
(Continued from Monday)
The other day, a Chinese was killed by his compatriot. According to reports, the suspect in the shooting yielded an ID of the People’s Liberation Army. This, according to administration critics, as well as social media experts, is proof that China is conducting intelligence work on us and might be ready to deploy an army to wage a war within our soil in a snap of a finger.
However, what was overlooked was the fact that suspect also yielded P345,000 which he claimed he had gotten from the victim. According to the suspect, he and the victim agreed to meet up to change his RMB10,000 for Philippine pesos as he needed to the money to extend his visa. But then the conversion rate for Chinese yuan is only P7.29, thus, his RM10,000 is only worth P72,900.
Clearly, there are holes in the suspect’s story which the media ignored. They focused on the PLA ID, which would politicize the story.
All the issues raised against POGOs are not gaming and regulation-related. However, critics of this administration are quick to capitalize on the issue of Pogos simply because they mainly involved Chinese and the President is said to be friendlier toward China than to other countries. They’d rather ignore the failure of law enforcement agencies to address the issues rather than focus on the positives of the POGOs.
Prior to Pagcor’s issuance of POGO licenses, most online gaming operators, which were operating under the licenses issued by the Economic Zone Authorities were only remitting more or less P56 million a year to the national government.
Under Pagcor stewardship, income from POGOs showed steady growth through the years. From P73.72 million in 2016, they zoomed to P3.12 billion in 2017; P6.11 billion in 2018 and P5.73 billion in 2019. Also, from 2016 to 2019, revenues collected from POGOs—including application, processing and regulatory fees—already amounted to over P18 billion.
Those are aside from POGOs’ contribution to the overall economy, such as 5-percent share in the real estate sales amounting about P75 billion, lease of office space estimated at one million square meters amounting to about P9.6 billion, another P5.4 billion as payment for utilities including power, water, Internet, etc. Nograles estimates the industry to raise P283 billion a year, equivalent to 1.4 percent of the country’s GDP.
As such, it is the belief of this writer that if Pagcor has to do something regarding the issues of criminality being raised by their critics, is for the agency to urge the pertinent law enforcement agencies to act decisively and address that clearly are in their areas of responsibility.
And better yet, we must let Pagcor do its job of granting gaming licenses and regulating them. Same goes for POGOs.