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The only thing that the mowed down trees have been
“mute witnesses”
to was the graft and corruption that prospered at the IA before the
upright Harper was appointed earlier this year
DESPITE her futile attempts to
talk tough and scare brownie points with current her big boss who
is no friend of Intramuros Administration chief Bambi Harper,
executive director Corazon Davis of the Department of Environment
and Natural Resource’s National Capital Region office seemed to
have fallen flat on her face in trying to nail Harper over the
accidental chopping down of six narra and two mahogany trees at the
IA regulated Plaza Roma opposite Manila Cathedral.
Without panting for the oxygen of
publicity and issuing a notice against Harper for violation of
Presidential Decree 953, Davis should have sought the advice of a
good lawyer who were a certain would have informed her that it was
the contractor given the job of cutting down the 17 trees permitted
by virtue of a DENR permit is the guy who should be held culpable
for so brutally—and stupidly—deviating from his strict brief.
At least Mayor Alfredo Lim of
Manila, a lawyer, read the legal ramifications of the environmental
chain saw massacre correctly and cleared Harper, ordering City
Hall’s legal department to charge the contractor, Fernando Simborio
of the Batangas based Green Philippine Nursery Plant, with five
counts of violation of PD 953.
Incidentally, stricken by a
serious case of verbal diarrhea, Davis pontificated: “Those trees
were mute witnesses to momentous events in the Walled City.”
Anyone one who has been following
the sorry goings-on at the IA in the past decade or so can attest,
the only thing that the mowed down trees have been “mute
witnesses” to was the graft and corruption that prospered at the
IA before the upright Harper was appointed earlier this year to
clean up the mess by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
And we didn’t hear any verbal
thundering from Davis when DENR Secretary Lito Atienza, in his
previous role as Mayor of Manila, ordered (despite an uproar by the
caring environmental community) well over two hundred trees to be
chopped down at the two historic sites of Mehan Garden and Arroceros
Forest Park. And ironically, Harper’s voice was one of the loudest
to rail against Atienza at that time.
Hey Ms. Davis, now those trees
really were “mute witnesses” to unfolding history over a century
or two.
As for Davis huffing and puffing
about sending Harper to jail, we can inform her that in the past few
days the always elegantly attired Harper has consulted with her
personal couturier Ben Farralles and commissioned him to design
several suitable prison outfits for her.
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EVEN as the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco)
is locked in a fierce dispute with the government over the alleged
overpricing of electricity, it is rewarding shareholders a total of
P560.12 million in cash dividends, ahead of a planned refund of
customer meter deposits.
This was disclosed by Rep.
Eduardo Gullas of Cebu who was citing a regulatory filing by Meralco
in which the 11-member board of directors of the country’s largest
electricity distributor declared a cash dividend at the rate of
P0.5025 per share.
The dividend is payable to
shareholders on October 21, a month before Meralco’s previously
announced P2.8-billion refund of customer meter deposits. The
electric utility had earlier announced that it would reimburse
customers a total of P1.51 billion in meter deposits. Including
interest of six to 10 percent per annum, the total refund would
amount to P2.8 billion.
“Meralco should have repaid the
meter deposits of its customers first, before handing out the cash
bonuses to shareholders. This would have been the fair and
compassionate thing to do—for the firm to extend relief to
customers first, before fattening the pockets of shareholders,”
Gullas said.
Gullas said Meralco’s latest
cash dividend is worth a total of P560.12 million, based on the
company’s 1,114,678,709 common shares outstanding. He added that
the P560.12 million is on top of the P557.39 million in cash
dividends that Meralco distributed to shareholders on May 13, at a
rate of P0.50 per share.
Among the entities that would
gain from the dividends are First Philippine Union Fenosa Inc. and
First Philippine Holdings Corp.—two Lopez family controlled firms
that together own 33.38 percent of Meralco.
The dividend beneficiaries also
include the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), Social
Security System, Land Bank of the Philippines, Home Development
Mutual Fund or Pag-IBIG Fund and the Philippine Health Insurance
Corp.
bizzfizz_98@yahoo.com
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