‘Shell, Petron cheated government of P1.5-B’

Oil giants Petron and Shell had defrauded the government of more than P1.5 billion each by using fake tax credit certificates to settle their tax obligations, a finance official told the House good government committee yesterday.

Director Ernesto Hiansen, who heads the finance department’s one-stop shop that is in charge of issuing tax credit certificates (TCCs), said Petron used 389 TCCs worth P1.153 billion between 1992 and 1998.

Out of those certificates, 140 TCCs worth P658 million were found fraudulent, said Hiansen, who is a member of Task Force 156, a composite presidential team looking into the tax scam.

He also said Shell used 476 TCCs with a value amounting to P1.710 billion.

Of these, 219 certificates worth P906 million were discovered to be fake, he added.

He revealed that many of the TCCs used by Petron and Shell came from the Chingkoe group of 12 export-oriented textile companies which he said was issued P2.5 billion in tax credits based on fraudulent claims.

Tax credits are an incentive to export companies to enable them to be competitive with foreign producers.

Hiansen said investigation by Task Force 156 showed that Petron and Shell delivered millions of liters of oil to the Chingkoe group at a time when these textile companies were no longer operating or had no use for oil.

"In other words, these were ghost deliveries. There were really no transactions between Petron and Shell and the Chingkoe group," he said.

His revelations prompted Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. (PDP-Laban, Makati) to comment that the two oil giants "were not innocent bystanders after all."

"In fact, they are neck-deep in this scam," he said.

Petron and Shell had previously asserted that their tax payments in the form of TCCs were aboveboard.

The good government committee chaired by Rep. Ruy Elias Lopez (Lakas, Davao City) held its initial hearing on the P5.3 billion tax credit scam exposed by Rep. Oscar Moreno (Lakas, Misamis Oriental) two months ago.

The Chingkoe group accounted for half the amount that the government allegedly lost in the irregularity.

During the hearing, Finance Undersecretary Cornelio Gison, who heads Task Force 156, admitted that they have an agreement with Ombudsman Aniano Desierto for the filing of 12 separate plunder cases against the Chingkoe companies.

However, he and other task force members testified that despite such an agreement, Desierto filed in October last year a consolidated case against the textile firms without even informing them.

They said they came to know of the case filed by the Ombudsman only when they read in the newspapers stories about Moreno’s exposé in which the Misamis congressman accused Desierto of deliberately trying to whitewash the tax fraud to let the Chingkoe group go scot-free.

Apparently to justify the fact that they were unaware of the Ombudsman’s move, Gison said their job was only to assist Desierto who has jurisdiction over the aspect of prosecuting the Chingkoe group and other scam perpetrators.

Moreno said Gison and task force members do not have a correct reading of their mandate.

He said the task group was created to prosecute those responsible for the fraud and to recover lost government revenues.

"But it seems that the task force and the executive branch are not interested in recovering the billions in lost revenues. Task force members are also afraid of Desierto," he said.

Lopez shared Moreno’s assessment of how the Gison group has been allegedly bungling its job.

"We are not seeing enough interest on your part to prosecute these cases. We have been looking into several cases of irregularities, and this one takes the cake because it involves billions of pesos that could be of big help to our poor people," he said.

Lopez and Moreno at one point threatened to discontinue the inquiry due to the apparent disinterest of Gison and his task force on the cases that they are supposed to prosecute.