|
At first, I was exultant that finally the nation would be spared the
antics of two certified administration tormentors—Senators Panfilo
Lacson and Alan Peter Cayetano—after the latter announced that the
Senate blue ribbon committee would soon release its report about the
aborted ZTE-NBN contract.
Cayetano even hinted that despite the voluminous
testimonies of witnesses, there was no smoking gun that would
directly link the President to the transaction. He, however, said
that the Senate would recommend the filing of charges against some
people allegedly involved in the deal.
But I was wrong. It took only a tiny spark—the
supposed eyewitness account of yet another mystery man on the visit
of President Arroyo to the ZTE headquarters in Shenzhen—to ignite
once again Cayetano’s extraordinary passion for pulling down the
Arroyo administration.
Cayetano is now saying that there is a need to
reopen the investigation since Vice Gov. Rolex Suplico of Iloilo has
added a new dimension to the scandal.
He is accusing the President of wrongdoing
simply because she played golf with her husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo,
during the course of her visit to the ZTE offices last year.
Here is Cayetano’s vacuous if not convoluted
analogy of the President’s private visit to the ZTE offices: “If
it looks like a duck, it talks like a duck, it eats like a duck,
it’s a duck. So, even if you say it’s a social duck, it’s a
private duck, it’s an official duck, it’s still a duck. So,
let’s not call it by any name.”
Since when have the meetings of a head of state
with prospective investors been made a crime? During their visits to
the United States, all presidents, from Ramos to Estrada to Arroyo,
have met with American investors, including Bill Gates, during
social functions. But have they committed a crime?
I have said several times that the ZTE-NBN deal
is now a carcass after the President cancelled it. Beating a dead
horse is bad enough but beating a carcass is plain stupidity.
The Senate should now focus its attention in
finding solutions to our creeping economic crisis: the unabated rise
of the price of imported crude oil, the rising inflation, the
weakening of the peso and the soaring costs of rice, electricity and
essential commodities.
For the senators to do otherwise would be a
criminal dereliction of their sworn duty to work for the people’s
interests.
Fighting a behemoth
It is now evident, as some quarters have
suspected, that Suplico’s sudden revelation of that mystery ZTE
witness was a ploy to contain the people’s rage over Meralco’s
rate overcharging. The timing of Suplico’s supposed expose gave it
all.
But fighting the Lopezes is like fighting the
windmills of Don Quixote. Politicians know that when they hit the
Lopezes, the consequence would be devastating to their political
careers because they would be subjected to a daily dose of scathing
remarks by the family’s attack dogs in the ABS-CBN network
composed of commentators, anchors and newscasters.
This could be the reason why aside from Senators
Juan Ponce Enrile and Miriam Defensor-Santiago, you do not hear even
a squeak from the presidentiables in the Senate, including Senate
President Manuel Villar, who normally would comment on any issue
just to keep himself in the limelight.
Now, the Lopezes have unleashed their full might
not just in the air lanes but also in the print media in the form of
full-page ads, some of them in gutter language. Based on its
penchant for passing on its operational expenses to customers, it
could also charge the millions paid for these ads to us, the hapless
consumers.
But the ad signed by Meralco’s top honcho,
Chairman Oscar Lopez of the First Philipping Holdings Corp, the
investment arm of the Lopezes, showed their true color.
Lopez called for the scrapping of the royalties
on natural gas projects and the value added tax (VAT) on power to
trim down the electricity rate by P1.25 per kilowatt hour.
Nice proposal, except that in reducing
electricity rates, Lopez never promised to stop passing on to
Meralco consumers the firm’s own electricity bills amounting to
P427 million or to refund them the P21.4 billion collected as meter
deposits.
Nor did Lopez assure Meralco customers that they
would be paid the P14.4 billion remainder of the P30 billion that
the Supreme Court has ordered the firm to refund after it unlawfully
included its income taxes from 1994 to 2002 as part of its
operational expenses as well as the excessive systems loss also
passed on to consumers.
Mr. Lopez is putting the onus of reducing
Meralco’s rates solely on the government. Perhaps he has forgotten
that charity begins at home. How sad.
opinion@manilatimes.net
|
