US 7th Fleet will visit Cebu again

I had the good fortune to be at the legislative building at the Cebu City Hall for the unveiling of the portrait of Don Vicente Rama, the father of the Cebu City Charter (we celebrated our 72nd Charter Day yesterday, that is why Cebu City had a long weekend) because an hour later, US Ambassador Kristie Kenney arrived for the launching of the Clean Air Youth Alliance (CAYA) also at the grounds of the Cebu City Hall. So I was able to cover the two important events that morning.

During her impromptu presscon, I asked Ambassador Kenney (I was surprised that she recognized me from my photo in The STAR) if under the Obama administration, Cebu would once more enjoy having our US visas approved just like the old days. Ambassador Kenney was very forthright in her response, which was, of course, disappointing to Cebuanos that US visas would have to be done in Manila because of lack of personnel to handle the volume of documentation for US visas. But her reply doesn’t mean we Cebuanos should stop hoping because we will still hope that someday this can be restored for the convenience of Filipinos who live outside Manila.

For my other question, Ambassador Kenney gave us some good news when I asked her when would the US 7th Fleet return for goodwill visits to Cebu. She was kind of excited that we would have a US Navy ship come and visit Cebu by May this year… and I told her that I hope it would be an aircraft carrier. Since 2000, the US Navy has been coming to the Philippines on goodwill visits, but shying away from Cebu (to think, we offer the best in tourism facilities) because of a mauling incident that happened to a taxi driver named Marcelo Batestil in March 2000.

I remember that incident well because one of the taxicabs involved in that fiasco was owned by my brother-in-law. From the story I gathered, two US servicemen took the taxicab of Batestil to one of Cebu’s nightspots and paid him for his services. But the driver apparently took it upon himself to wait for the servicemen outside. So when the US servicemen got out of the nightspot, they apparently took the same cab to another place and when they got there, he demanded payment for the time he waited for them.

Knowing that they already paid him earlier, an argument ensued and in the fracas, they bumped another taxicab (this was the one owned by my brother-in-law) and this developed into a brawl. Naturally, the taxi driver stood no chance in fighting two burly US servicemen. The driver filed a case, but settled out of court for the dollars offered to him.

Since I have friends in the Taxi Operators Association, I’ve been asking around whether Batestil is still driving in Cebu. I learned that he apparently returned to his hometown in Mindanao. This incident was a big blow to Cebu’s tourism campaign because after it, the US 7th Fleet no longer dropped by Cebu for a goodwill visit.

But most of the taxi drivers of Cebu knew that Batestil tried to con the US servicemen for more money and when this incident became public, he had the full support of the Cebu-based leftist organizations who are avowed anti-US militants. At the end of the day, it was Cebu’s tourism industry that suffered because of an unscrupulous taxi driver.

Last week, the flagship of the US 7th Fleet, the USS Blue Ridge (this is a command vessel), was in Manila for another goodwill visit and this report by Ambassador Kenney is no doubt good news for Cebu, especially in these times when many businesses are in the doldrums due to the global financial crisis. A thousand or so US servicemen enjoying Cebu’s tourism sites is without a doubt an added boon to Cebu’s tourism industry and therefore we are looking forward to the return of the US 7th Fleet for a goodwill visit.

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I was about to throw away a copy of the Feb. 13-14 of BusinessWorld when I came across a rather interesting report in its Banking & Finance section that read “PBCom Major Stockholders Begin Talks on Divestment.” Apparently PBCom is required to sell 67 percent of their shares by the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC), otherwise PDIC would hold the sale for them. This stems from a grant of P7.64 billion to PBCom in 2004 but on the condition that the major stockholders, the Luy, Chung and Nubla families, divest their stake in the bank.

This brings us to the question, how healthy is PBCom these days? While they posted a net income of P8.2 million in 2008, it was 99 percent less than what the P1.04 billion they earned in 2007. So for transparency’s sake, I hope that the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) would give us a more detailed report on the financial health of PBCom.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.philstar.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, “Straight from the Sky,” every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.