U.P. opinion based on $33-M ‘expert’

It is noble to apologize for a mistake. Saying sorry does not diminish manhood, but adds to personhood.

One would think that, after being told that it mistook the Chinese constructor of the North Luzon Railway for one of 70 subsidiaries, the U.P. Law Center would apologize for misleading the Senate and slurring China. After all, that mistaken identity led the UPLC to opine that China National Machinery and Equipment Corp. (Group), China’s 6th largest state firm, has no capability or experience to build tracks or trains. That opinion in turn led Senate President Franklin Drilon to open an investigation, and insult Beijing’s highest leaders who personally had studied the Northrail project and picked CNMEG for it.

But, no, in a Letter to the Editor yesterday, UPLC’s Harry Roque insisted that they made no such mistake, and that CNMEG and its ancillary CNMEC are one and the same. Granted. Still, the UPLC’s own report shows it wrong, and betrays its sloppiness.

Claimed the UPLC: "Has CNMEC performed a railway project in the past? To answer this question, research on the Internet revealed a company named China National Machinery and Equipment Import-Export Corp. It can be assumed to be the same as CNMEC since the advertisement of the Northrail Corp. claimed that the contractor ‘is ranked No. 37 in the Global Engineering News Record of the 225 largest international contractors’ and corroborated by the company’s own webpage (see Exhibit 5.4-A). The webpage of CNMEC states that it is a trading company focusing on ‘construction machinery, electricity, pumps and vacuum equipment, mining machinery’ ... Railways construction was not mentioned as one of CNMEC’s core competences. Neither has it claimed a single turnkey project for complete rail transport systems ... It can be inferred that the Northrail project in the Philippines will be CNMEC’s first venture on the subject – within or outside China."

Yet, the Exhibit 5.4-A, which the UPLC waves, is not about CNMEG or CNMEC. It is about CMEC, the trading auxiliary. That is why it does not advertise railway construction and train supply, which its mother company does. And that is why CMEC, in the website cited in Exhibit 5.4-A, can state to be only 106th in 1996 and 64th in 2003 in Engineering News. UPLC clearly mistook CMEC to be CNMEG or CNMEC, although Northrail officials suspect it was deliberate deception.

Roque in his letter also claimed the UPLC’s findings on CMEC to be CNMEG was "mere inference or presumption ... to be determined after a complete investigation."

What, they submitted to the Senate mere presumptions? And yet, the opinion does not make an inference but a self-satisfied, if wrong, assertion: "It should be noted that the full name of the contractor is China National Machinery and Equipment Import-Export Corp., a trading company. The omission of the appellation ‘Import-Export’ is misleading and may have been intentional to hide the fact that CNMEC is not technically qualified."

After making flimsy excuses, Roque then claimed that my listing of CNMEG’s many railway projects in China and overseas has no basis in fact. If he humbly requests instead of arrogantly standing by patent wrongs, I would gladly deliver to him documents six inches thick, and brief him on my talks with CNMEG chair Ren Hongbin, a member of China’s cabinet. I would also have taught him a thing or two about Internet researching; too, on the need for a true investigator to draw all information possible. The Aug. 25 UPLC opinion commissioned by Drilon was an update of an earlier study many months ago. All that time, they relied solely on papers given by Drilon’s office and polluted parties. They did not bother to check with the most obvious sources: the Chinese embassy and Northrail Corp. officials. In effect, they were fed garbage, and so they churned out garbage.

Lastly, Roque claimed that I missed the point and should look into the UPLC’s other findings about Northrail. I’m no lawyer, but I’ve heard about a principle of credibility of evidence that states, "falsity in one, falsity in all." If the UPLC presents false information on CNMEG and CNMEC and CMEC as being one and the same, then it follows that all its other items are likely to be false.

Readers from U.P., incensed by the UPLC’s clumsy research, are asking on whom it based its reckless opinion. From television appearances, they only know Roque, who also happens to be a lawyer of Minority Rep. Ronaldo Zamora of the botched impeachment case against Gloria Arroyo.

The report listed as technical experts Hussein Lidasan, Crispin Diaz, Primitivo Cal, and Rene Santiago.

Cal used to be undersecretary of transportation and communications. He was in the news recently as one of several officials charged with graft in connection with the Piatco airport contract that the Supreme Court voided.

Santiago used to be president of Northrail Corp. in the ’90s. It was during his time that the Spanish Railway Group submitted a proposal to build Northrail, first for $600 million and then for $1.2 billion, compared to China’s $421 million today. The project never pushed through back then, because Spain wanted to relocate all the squatters first along the old Phil. National Railways right-of-way from Caloocan in Metro Manila to Clark Field in Pampanga (again compared to China’s willingness to lay down the rails by phases of squatter relocation).

But here’s the catch. The Spanish Group made a feasibility plan, for which the Philippine government paid a staggering $33 million for a project that never took off. Northrail engineering and finance managers had cautioned Santiago, in a memo on Oct. 31, 1997, against paying such amount for a study worth only $1.11 million, based on a percentage of the unfinished construction design cost. Why Santiago paid $33 million just the same is something the UPLC should study. But then, they can’t be relied on with basic research, can they?

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