MANILA, Philippines - The plunder complaint of a motorists’ rights group against Stradcom Corp., the exclusive information technology provider of the Land Transportation Office, got a huge boost after various groups and agency stakeholders expressed their support to the move.
In a forum yesterday, Tony Halili, president of the Private Emission Testing Center Owners Association (PETCOA), a major group that supports the full implementation of the Clean Air Act, said “it’s about time that someone or a group makes a stand, expose and sue Stradcom Corp. for its abusive and illegal acts of making the motoring public, agency players and the LTO itself as its virtual milking cow for so many years now through the so-called interconnectivity scheme.”
Halili was reacting to the complaint filed by Road Users Protection Advocates (RUPA) before the Department of Justice (DOJ) holding Stradcom liable for plunder for more than P2 billion in interconnectivity fees it collected from motorists that are purportedly outside its build-own-operate (BOO) contract with the government.
RUPA claimed that based on LTO records, Stradcom has collected P1.273 billion in interconnectivity fees from private emission testing centers (PETCs) and P950 million in interconnectivity fees for verification of certificates of insurance coverage.
This developed as Halili strongly belied the claim of Stradcom that the benefits of interconnectivity far outweigh the costs and that it has addressed past problems of the transport sector such as the proliferation of fake third party liability insurance policies and spurious emission test certificates.
He explained that based on available records, majority of erring PETCs that were either padlocked or suspended by the LTO Central Monitoring committee in the past were actually using Stradcom’s direct connect facility. He cited the case of a safehouse that was raided by the agents of the National Bureau of Investigation late last year for dishing out spurious fake emission certificates. NBI agents discovered that the operator of the safehouse is Ed Rivera, the owner of Enviroguard and Smoke in the City testing centers.
Prior to the raid, both Enviroguard and Smoke in the City were earlier ordered closed by LTO chief Virginia Torres for issuing dubious smoke emission test results.