Pilipinas Shell a huge taxpayer and a smuggler?

In case you may have already forgotten your history, today we commemorate the 66th anniversary of the invasion of Leyte, which is also known as the MacArthur Landing in Leyte. It was then when war weary Filipinos pinned their hopes on the words and the promise made by the American Caesar, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose “I shall return” promise he fulfilled 66-years ago in Red Beach, Palo, Leyte.

It is interesting to note that while the famous newsreel showed Gen. MacArthur emerging from an LCM (Landing Craft Mechanized) together with President Sergio Osmeña Sr., General Carlos P. Romulo and Major General Basilio Valdes and key officers of the USAFFE (United States of America Forces in the Far East) wading ashore for all the world to see, I have a book that showed feet of Gen. MacArthur arriving in Tacloban Port on board a Patrol Torpedo (PT) Boat. The author noted that once Tacloban City was cleared of Japanese defenders, Gen. MacArthur wanted to step on Philippine soil exactly the way he left it three and a half years earlier on board a PT Boat that brought him to Cagayan de Oro and on to Australia.

Hence you can say that Gen. MacArthur made sure that his landing would be properly filmed for the whole world to see, so when the LCM dropped its ramp and the General and the rest waded ashore in Palo Beach, Gen. MacArthur then went to a communications jeep and made his stirring announcement “People of the Philippines, I have returned! By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil.”

I write a lot about history so that our children won’t ever forget that once upon a time, a foreign nation colonized us and another invaded and occupied us. Today, people say that we do not need a strong Armed Force in the Philippines because no foreign nation is threatening us. This is exactly what people used to say before World War II and we were caught unawares. I say that we need to strengthen the AFP so that other countries won’t be bullying us or even dare attack our native land, where the blood of brave Filipino soldiers was shed in order for us to savor our democratic way of life.

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Last Thursday I was surprised to read in the national dailies that the Bureau of Customs (BoC) filed a multi-billion-peso technical smuggling suit against oil giant Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp. This was announced by Customs Commissioner Angelito Alvarez because he believes that Shell wrongfully declared and classified petroleum importations from Aug. 2005 to May 2009 and thus shortchanged or worse “defrauded” the Philippine government some P24.4 billion in excise and value-added taxes. This is supposedly the biggest ever suit filed against an oil firm in Philippine history.

A year ago, we have been very critical of Pilipinas Shell (and of course the other big “3” oil companies) because we in Cebu have been paying at that time for more than a year, pump prices of fuel products that averaged somewhere between P7 to P9 per liter over the pump prices in Metro Manila, the highest cost of gasoline in the country! Back then, the Cebu Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Inc. (CCCI) called the attention of then Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and CCCI officials were made to attend a Cabinet meeting at the Malacañang sa Sugbo (which under Pres. P-Noy has become a ghost edifice) and then Energy Sec. Angelo Reyes held a public hearing in Cebu and as luck would have it….nothing happened!

Hence Cebu Gov. Gwen F. Garcia filed a suit against the Big “3” in the hope that the Department of Justice (DoJ) Task Force would get into the bottom of the reality that Cebu has been singled out to pay higher gasoline prices over the rest of the country. The Arroyo administration is gone and the Aquino Administration Energy Czar, now my good friend and fellow Cebuano Sec. Rene Almendras has asked us for more time. So I should be siding with the government on this case against Pilipinas Shell.

But not so fast! I got an email from an Edgar O. Chua, country manager of the Shell Companies in the Philippines explaining in detail that it did not defraud the government by its non-payment of excise or value added taxes. He added further that Shell’s 2005-2009 import shipment issue is not new as there is already a pending case against Customs at the Court of Tax Appeals… that there is no Customs classification code on imported Catalytic Cracked Gasoline (CCG) or Light Catalytic Cracked Gasoline (CCG), hence Customs used a comparable product tariff heading.

Hence I suggest that the BoC first clear up its own issues before slapping one of the nation’s top 10 taxpayers with a technical smuggling rap. It is inconceivable that a company that pays P26 billion annually would go into technical smuggling to save money, when it is the BoC that cannot get its act together? Hmmm this is from the BoC Chief who cheated his golf scores?

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected] or vsbobita@ gmail.com. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.