I hurt powerful business interests – Climaco

Senior Presidential Consultant for Strategic Projects Gloria Tan Climaco said yesterday her alleged "tryst" with Fraport officials this week to settle the Piatco issue is a lie.

"SARS or not, I never bought a ticket in the first place. I am now a private citizen but I keep getting brickbats because I worked against contracts that are disadvantageous to the nation, hurting powerful economic interests in the process," she said.

She added: "Last week, I was accused of brokering a supposed buy-out of Piatco by Fraport. This week I was accused of engineering a buy-out of Nextel by another foreign firm, a transaction that had been accomplished before I joined the Nextel board in 1999 and could easily be attested to by the Nextel corporate secretary."

Climaco said she expects more allegations to come to fore because there is an orchestrated effort to get back at her. She said she hopes media would check their "facts" first for the sake of fair play.

"The parties I have hurt know they must taint my name in the belief that a tainted Climaco becomes less credible as they try to revive their onerous contracts. They are wrong because it is not me but the documents that would show who is telling the truth," she said.

"This is the price I am paying for my short stint in public service. That I quit my Cabinet position is the biggest signal I had no designs or motives in the Piatco issue other than the mandate to serve the people," she said.

The case is now with the Supreme Court. Earlier, the Senate Blue-Ribbon Committee found the Piatco contract to build the Terminal 3 at the airport "intrinsically flawed" and void since it did not have the requisite government approvals and violated the build-operate-transfer (BOT) law.

The report raised the possibility that Piatco might have submitted its proposal "in bad faith" by initially offering acceptable provisions only to re-negotiate them after getting the award. The original contract was re-negotiated or changed four times, the last three being worse than the second, the Senate report said, adding that in effect "the project has five contracts."

One of the changes Piatco was able to renegotiate was the abandonment of an P800-million tunnel connecting Terminal 3 to Terminal 2 for the transport of passengers and cargo. This was replaced by a P100-million access road that required the destruction of a part of Nayong Pilipino.