Camacho must be pretty desperate

In insisting to sell Petron at this time, Finance Secretary Lito Camacho must be pretty desperate. Anyone in his position would be too. That yawning budget deficit stares him in the face day and night. But desperation is no reason to do stupid things, like selling Petron.

For one thing, the timing is bad. The 3.75 million shares of Petron still held by the government will probably fetch P6 billion, compared with the P25 billion the government earned when it first privatized 60 percent of its shares in 1995. Like most investors in corporate equities in this country, the government is trapped in Petron until the market recovers.

The best reason to hang on to Petron is, as I said in this column last Friday, so we can keep the other oil giants more honest. Nothing beats being in the business itself for government to know the real numbers for a vital and politically sensitive commodity like oil. This is particularly important now that the industry is deregulated and as Toting Bunye mistakenly believes, has made government helpless to do anything.

Then, again as I explained last Friday, government should use Petron’s marketing clout to moderate the other oil companies. I remember a couple of occasions in the past when Petron did just that. I was still with Petron at that time and then Energy Secretary Ronnie Velasco made Petron price its gasoline 10 centavos cheaper than Shell and Caltex. The two multinationals had to follow suit or risk losing precious market share.

Lito Camacho, therefore, is wrong to say that Petron no longer has strategic value because everything is market driven. Precisely because things are market-driven, government’s presence in the oil industry through Petron, becomes even more important. The pressures of the job must be getting to Camacho these days. Punch drunk, he seems unable to think clearly.

As if selling Petron isn’t bad enough, Camacho also wants to sell even the 10 percent that PNOC-EC has in the Malampaya natural gas consortium, which PNOC-EC president Boomie Bomasang had the good foresight to invest in years ago. Again, access to information, not otherwise available to government, is at stake. Malampaya is an important natural resource and we will have no way of validating claims of Shell, its operator, unless we have proprietary rights. In the real world, our regulatory powers are not enough.

In any case, Malampaya pays handsome dividends. Camacho just wants to milk Malampaya dry during his watch to cover his budget deficits. Getting yearly dividends should be enough for this administration. Magtira naman sila para sa future generations.

Congress should watch these twin proposals with eagle eyes. Selling Petron and PNOC’s Malampaya interest have both been presented to the NEDA board. And this administration is desperate enough to make sure it happens even if Juan dela Cruz is at the losing end. Maybe Camacho has a buyer in mind who will make a killing ala Peace Bonds. Energy Secretary Vince Perez needs help in stopping these sales.

Airport security

The day after the Davao airport bombing, I received a press release from the DOTC press office that is so typical of our knee jerk bureaucracy. They often make the mistake of thinking that issuing press releases is the same as getting the real job done. Here is the lead sentence of that release:

"Transportation Secretary Leandro R. Mendoza yesterday ordered a heightened alert at the Ninoy Aquino Airport (NAIA) I and Centennial Terminal as well as other airports, ports and terminals following bombing at the Davao International Airport that killed at least 23 people and wounding 153 others last Tuesday afternoon."

Last Feb. 19, 2003, at least two weeks before the Davao airport bombing, I forwarded to the DOTC press office a news story from the Los Angeles Times that expressed fear "overseas flights leave US vulnerable." The LA Times article laments that "passenger jets bound for America remain vulnerable overseas because of gaps in global security, industry and government officials say."

"There are hundreds and hundreds of examples of gaping holes in foreign security," Capt. Steve Luckey, security chairman for the Air Line Pilots Association told the LA Times. "There is nothing out there to negate a recurrence of 9/11, provided [terrorists] do it at the end of the flight instead of the beginning."

The story was also very specific. "In Asia, Japan’s added countermeasures are offset by spotty progress among Southeast Asian countries, said an airline pilot who is based in Southern California and regularly flies Pacific Rim routes." The pilot told the LA Times that "We do have a concern, because it seems that Manila, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur – those are some of the main route structures that all these terrorists use."

James Loy, who heads the US Transportation Security Administration was quoted by the LA Times saying that "We are trying to persuade other countries to become part of the solution." Tsk! Tsk! I suppose he was referring to countries like the Philippines, who are still being persuaded to improve airport security.

So, the Davao airport bombing happened. It has so shocked the world that the Dow Jones fell that day. Now that the Philippines has been identified as the second front in Bush’s war on terrorism, it might be just a matter of time before flights from Philippine airports would be banned from flying directly to American airports. That would be a real tragedy not just for our national airline but for the country.

I am not really surprised to learn of such incompetence. DOTC’s press office was not even professional enough to respond to my questions when I forwarded the LA Times article. Now I know why. They have no answers. Or put another way, the answers are too embarrassing to give, as the Davao airport massacre showed.

All these ceremonial frisking of passengers are useless if DOTC can’t assure perimeter security. In war zone areas as in Mindanao, I doubt if they can even assure the safety of planes landing or taking off from shoulder fired heavy firearms in the hands of rebel groups. Remember that a civilian Israeli plane recently barely escaped such an attempt in an African country.

And we thought that because the DOTC secretary was a former PNP Chief, security would be his strong suit. Mali, pala.

Positively wrong

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class.

"In English," he explained, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative."

"However," the professor continued, "there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up. "Yeah, right."

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]