BSP: Arrovo bill printer not disqualified

MANILA, Philippines – The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) yesterday said Oberthur Technologies had not been disqualified from future government contracts after settling and agreeing to pay for misprinting the P100 “Arrovo” bills in 2005.

The BSP named Oberthur Technologies for the first time as the company that misprinted the “Arrovo” bills, stressing that the Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) had prequalified all bidders in the international competitive bidding.

BSP spokesperson Fe de la Cruz said Oberthur and the BSP had long resolved the issue, after an internal inquiry that determined the chain of events leading up to the misprint.

Oberthur recently won the contract to produce tamper-proof electronic passports for the Department of Foreign Affairs by embedding a microchip that would contain the identification and personal information of the passport bearer.

The BSP said that Oberthur was the same company that printed some 80 million P100 bills in 2005 that misspelled the surname of President Arroyo as “Arrovo.”

According to De la Cruz, the BSP at the time needed to subcontract the printing of legal tenders ahead of the Christmas season and at the height of its Clean Note Campaign.

De la Cruz said the BSP had campaigned aggressively to retire unfit legal tenders, asking banks, merchants and the public to exchange old and decrepit legal notes for new ones.

“People were really surrendering unfit notes back to us and we had to accelerate our production,” De la Cruz said. “But there was such a huge pick-up in the demand for new notes and since the holiday was coming up, our printing could not keep up.”

The printing of notes and other security documents is normally done by the BSP’s Security Printing Complex in Quezon City which also mints coins as well as refines gold into bullions.

De la Cruz said the BSP sent its master plate for P100 bills to Oberthur Technologies but the company had taken the initiative to alter the design which required retyping the name of President Gloria Arroyo.

“They decided that the signature of the president on the 100-peso note should be bigger than the typed name under it,” De la Cruz said. “In that process, the name was mistyped into Arrovo.”

De la Cruz said the BSP had formally apologized to the President as soon as the misprint was discovered and since then, the inquiry had traced the error back to Oberthur Technologies.

“But that case is settled, they had agreed to recompense the BSP to our satisfaction,” she said, adding that Oberthur and the BSP had entered into an arbitration process that settled the matter for both.

Since the Oberthur case had been settled to the BSP’s satisfaction, De la Cruz said the company was not blacklisted or otherwise discriminated against for future contracts.

Meantime, De la Cruz said the BSP was embarking on the modernization program for the SPC, expanding its production capacity so that it would not have to subcontract security printing requirements, including those of the DFA.