Former drug suspect controls power in GMA’s hometown

LUBAO, Pampanga — Electric power supply in this hometown of President Arroyo has turned out to be solely in the hands of a former suspected drug lord.

Amid alleged intervention from Malacañang, former drug lord suspect Alfredo Tiongco switched on power supply which he cut off the other day from 18 barangays here in apparent retaliation against a notice of power disconnection he got from an electric cooperative allegedly for his unpaid bills worth some P3 million.

Vicente Rodriguez, general manager of the controversial Pampanga Electric Cooperative II (Pelco II) rushed to Tiongco’s cement factory in Barangay Gumi here yesterday morning to negotiate with him for the immediate restoration of power to the barangays.

Tiongco switched off the distribution power from the transformer he owns at his cement factory in Barangay San Jose Gumi here the other day. It was the same factory raided by the police in 1997 on suspicion that is was also a shabu factory.

Sources from the municipal hall said that officials from Malacañang had been calling the office of Mayor Dennis Pineda for the resolution of the controversy.

Rodriguez admitted to The STAR that Pelco II had been depending on Tiongco’s power facility for the local distribution of electricity bought by his cooperative from the National Power Corp. (Napocor).

It is not clear why Pelco II has not built its own transformer here, despite some P15 million funds which President Arroyo gave to the cooperative for the project during her birthday she celebrated in Pampanga last year.

Provincial board member and former mayor Lilia Pineda, whose son Dennis is now mayor of this town noted that controversies have been hounding Pelco II under Rodriguez’s administration.

"Why has Pelco II allowed itself to depend on a man with some unsavory record?" she said in a telephone interview from the US where she is undergoing medical treatment.

She was referring to several cases that landed Tiongco in the headlines since 1993 when a cache of shabu was found in a fishing boat he allegedly owned at the Navotas fish port. A Quezon City court dismissed the case six years later for lack of evidence.

Last year, Immigration Commissioner Andrea Domingo alleged that two Chinese chemists engaged in the manufacture of shabu had been working for Tiongco.

The Chinese nationals were arrested in the Dimarucut Lumber Compound also reportedly owned by Tiongco in Sta. Cruz, also in this town.