Over Power Project; BCDA, CDC officials charged

CLARK FIELD, Pampanga – A power company has filed criminal and administrative charges against top officials of the state-owned Clark Development Corp. (CDC), including Bases Conversion Development Authority (BCDA) chairman Rogelio Singson, after its proposal to supply 23.5 megawatts of power to the Clark special economic zone was junked.

Gaudencio Sarangaya and his son, Ramon, chairman and president, respectively, of Super A Enterprises which lost to another firm in the bidding for power supply, filed the charges with the Office of the Ombudsman.

In February 1998, the firm paid some P8 million for the equipment and facilities of two old power plants left by the US Air Force at the ecozone.

The equipment consisted of a powerful transformer, nine Fairbanks Morse generators with a capacity of 2.5 megawatts each, six Norberg generators with a capacity of 1.02 megawatts each, three fuel tanks with a capacity of 131,890 to 420,000 gallons, and accessories for generators and transformers. The CDC bid them out as scrap.

While the original contract was for Super A to remove all the "scrap" from the two old power plants within nine months, former CDC vice president for operations Angelo Medina approved in March 1999 the modification of Super A’s contract to allow it to rehabilitate the power plants .

Earlier in August 1998, Super A proposed to supply "bulk power" to the Clark ecozone after the power plants would have been rehabilitated. The company repeated its proposal in July 1999 after it noted that power supply at the ecozone was unstable.

Also named respondents in the case were CDC vice president Hilana Timbol-Roman and enterprise and monitoring manager Cynthia Marigundon.

Super A said Singson informed them last October that the CDC had already entered into a joint venture agreement with Clark Power Corp. for power augmentation at the ecozone.