Gov’t will help pre-need victims, daw

Ate Glue wants to help victims of pre-need education plans but is at a loss on how to legally do this. Rep. Joey Salceda told me that victims of pre-need education plans are eligible for public assistance or subsidies because Ate Glue has already made it a public policy to assist them. The only problem now is, how.

The first attempt to do just that was to ask the GSIS to give a billion pesos in dividends to CHED for providing scholarship assistance to pre-need victims. But this was not allowed by COA, as it ruled all dividends must go to the general fund.

Joey, who is also chairman of the House appropriations committee, is looking at setting aside the billion pesos from the unprogrammed portion of the National Budget for this purpose. But Congress may still be debating the budget next month and the money is needed for enrollment in the next two weeks.

Joey emphasized that whatever assistance will be provided to pre-need victims is "pantawid lamang". There is still a need to get a long term solution to the problem and the SEC as well as the courts will still have to act on cases pending before them. Most of all, Joey stressed that government is not bailing out any of the firms, which is why any assistance would be given directly to the victims.

Most likely, any government assistance would be coursed through CHED and the state colleges and universities. If the victim happens to be a student in Ateneo or La Salle, sorry na lang... he or she is on their own.

Over 70 percent of the victims took out education plans from College Assurance Plan (CAP). But the pre-need industry may as well be dead, given the sharp decline in public confidence for the product. Who is the idiot who will now buy a plan, given the mess the industry is in?

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), more than 100,000 college planholders may not be able to enroll this school year as four pre-need firms suspended payments to their open planholders after they filed for rehabilitation and suspension of payments before the local courts. SEC chairwoman Fe Barin said the figures were provided by pre-need companies College Assurance Plan (CAP), Platinum Plans Inc, Pacific Plans and the Professional Group.

Planholders of the troubled pre-need companies complained of mismanagement, accusing the firms of misappropriating funds. The companies, however, blamed a host of financial and legal factors for their financial woes. They claimed certain factors of the business were beyond their control, causing their financial obligations to grow out of proportion.

Pacific Plans blamed the partial deregulation of tuition fee increases in 1990. CAP said the stringent SEC circulars were the cause of its trust fund deficiency. CAP said the SEC is requiring companies to maintain high reserves and follow new actuarial rules that do not apply to the pre-need industry.

Meanwhile, holders of pre-need plans have united and have agreed to merge their legal teams. In a meeting the other weekend, some 4,000 pre-need plan holders agreed to file criminal cases against the directors and officers of pre-need firms that the planholders believe to have committed fraud, estafa, syndicated estafa and other punishable acts.

The assembly was organized by the Parents Enabling Parents (PEP) Coalition, which is at the forefront of legal battles against the Yuchengcos and other directors and officers of Pacific Plans Inc. Philip Piccio, president of PEP Coalition, and five other planholders of Pacific filed two syndicated estafa cases against Ambassador Alfonso T. Yuchengco and 24 other directors and officers of the preneed firm, including some of his children, at the Manila Regional Trial Court on April 25, 2006.

I know how cheated these victims feel. I still have to collect the last semester’s tuition of my youngest daughter from CAP. I guess, what adds insult to injury is seeing the big names behind these pre-need plans still living in scandalous luxury. And for some obscene reason, decent society still accepts these people as one of their own.

Rep. Salceda says he will also pursue the reform bill that would regulate the pre-need industry. But even Joey admits, the usefulness of this pre-need code is prospective. In the meantime, what do we do about the college education of the victims? The other tragedy is, we may have damaged the faith of our people in financial instruments and soured any desire to invest for the future. That’s bad news, considering our need to harness national savings to finance our economic development.

Biodiesel

I got this comment from Dodo Galindo, a top notch technical expert on fuels. I worked with him during the energy crisis years of the 80s, on precisely these alternative fuels, alcogas and cocodiesel. If there is a Pinoy who knows what he is talking about on this issue, it is Dodo.

Yes, I would like to see the day that Jollibee and McDo and the rest of the big users of cooking oil team up together and do a corporate responsible thing of gathering all of their used cooking oil and have the entire volume transesterified and converted to biodiesel and sell this back to their customers on a promo basis. I know, though, that there are quite a number of feed formulators who buy this used cooking oil and use them as part of their feed formulators.

Some others are also recycling used cooking oil and use this to cook food sold by street hawkers. The suggested corporate activity is, of course, the better alternative because we are assured that the used oil will be properly processed and can be sold with quality comparable to a brand new biodiesel.

If you recall, there was an experimental program in the early 80’s on the use of cocodiesel, a blend of 10 percent coconut oil and 90 percent by volume diesel fuel. The only problem was that the coconut oil used was crude nut oil (CNO, oil directly extracted from copra) which had a lot of "free fatty acids" which caused fuel filter clogging. This caused the demise of the program after just a few months of limited field testing.

Vegetable has glycerine which generates long-term operational problems in high speed automotive type diesel engines. These problems are not obvious in the short term. There are many write-ups attesting to the use of just a blend of vegetable oil and diesel fuel and this is due to the fact that end users enjoy success in the short term.

However, automotive engine manufacturers and car manufacturers do not allow the use of pure vegetable oil either at 100 percent or at lower blends with diesel fuel, but instead prefer to use vegetable esters, where vegetable oils are reacted with an alcohol to remove the glycerine from pure vegetable oil. These ester products are very similar to diesel fuel. Today, these esters (also known worldwide as biodiesel) are the products of choice in Europe and North America.

The preferred biodiesel is vegetable methyl ester like coconut methyl ester (for the Philppines) because it has the capability to clean the fuel system and improve engine efficiency and fuel lubricity. Pure coconut oil does not have this cleaning ability.

As a sidelight, the first dedicated biodiesel plant (60 million liters a year capacity) of Chemrez was recently inaugurated by PGMA. I hope this will result in a new sunrise of the coconut industry. The plant would need resource from at least 100,000 hectares of coconut land.

Time off

Here’s Dr. Ernie E.

Dexter had just returned from two weeks of vacation. He asked his boss for two more weeks off to get married.

"What!" shouted the boss. "I can’t give you more time now. Why didn’t you get married while you were off?"

"Are you nuts?" replied Dexter. "That would have ruined my whole vacation."

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