Is Escobillo an agent of insurance companies?

Insurance Commissioner Evangeline C. Escobillo’s proposed solution to the billion-peso racket involving fake Compulsory Third Party Liability (CTPL) insurance policies is outrageous, to say the least.It is a total betrayal of the public interest.

Its effect would only be to prolong the defrauding of more than four million owners of motor vehicles who paid P2.5 billion in CTPL premiums last year and most of whom probably received fake CTPL policies. At the same time, it would enable crooked insurance companies to continue cheating the government of taxes due on the premiums which, in 2003, amounted to a whooping P268 million!

This means that millions of car owners who shell out an average of P700 for each CTPL policy annually are really not covered by a genuine insurance policy. In case of accidents, they will find themselves paying indemnity for vehicular accidents from their own pockets despite their supposed CTPL cover. Victims of vehicular accidents also have been deprived of compensation because of this great scam.

To stop this succulent racket which has been going on for years, Ms Escobillo has adopted the proposal of the insurance companies to establish a "clearinghouse" composed of insurance companies themselves, to process the authenticity of the CTPL policies. This is like appointing the crocodiles to guard the fish pens.

At the same time, they proposed that car owners should pay their premiums to the banks instead of directly to the insurance agents, which would add another agonizing step to the already laborious process of vehicle registration. Thus the proposed solutions would only worsen the problem, with the government and the private car owners at the receiving end where they have been for years.

Ms. Escobillo has audaciously announced that the government, through the Land Transportation Office, had adopted her scheme. It turned out the announcement was false because immediately thereafter the Department of Communications and Transportation, mother department of the LTO, denied the announcement. Neither has the Department of Finance, which supervises IC, approved the deal.

One wonders why Ms Escobillo is so eager to ram through this deceitful proposal of the insurance companies made through the Philippine Insurers and Reinsurers Association or PIRA. Has she become a CTPL insurance agent herself? But as insurance commissioner Ms Escobillo is not an agent of the insurance companies. She is an "agent" of the people who pay her salary.

Ms Escobillo must know that the proposal for a "clearinghouse" is just another variation of the failed "insurance pool" created by the government in the 1980s, and the "CTPL Authentication and Verification system" of PIRA. The insurance pool was abolished by government itself, and the authentication system was scrapped, after both were found ineffective in stopping insurance fraud and tax cheating.

Even PIRA, in its newspaper advertisement on October 12, 2005, had admitted that its authentication system was only "60 percent effective." Actually it was less than 50 percent effective as government continued to lose more than one half of the P500 million taxes due on the CTPL premiums, which indicate that more than one-half of the CTPLs have not been reported and were most probably fake.

Ms Escobillo should resign if the only thing she could think of is to abet the defrauding of the innocent public by the corrupt insurers.She has betrayed the public interest.

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THE LONG HOLIDAYS gave us time to catch up on our reading – if not rereading – books by famous authors, and some poetry that illuminates one’s mind and rekindles one’s sometimes lost spirituality.

One volume I got down from the shelves was a collection of poems by National Artist Edith L. Tiempo entitled The Charmer’s Box (published by De la Salle University Press, 1993). Let me share with you two of her poems.

The Rhythm of Violets
After a year of flowers,
Bright clustered coronets,
The violets went,
Leaves and all,


But not to die.
Slow and sudden
As the swell and fall
Of twenty-four hours,
Again the leaflets,
Furry-green and without scent.


So, it’s loosen the soil, then:
Small need to prod and pry.
Simply to listen,
And the earth’s stir
Sets a rising murmur
Under the hands;


The veins’ blood beasts
And spreads the swift rumor:
Something has burst the bands;
Sprung now form old bondage
Of water, sod, and air,
Heat and coolness race,
Or stall, or meander,
By hidden tutelage;


And the world holds grace
By strict season and art,
For blood is a wanderer
And must have the heart,
Where rhythm is prisoner
In the careful cage.

Flotsam
It borrowed its being from the foam,
The bright elusive breathing,
The flickery gasps of flame
Buried in the no-shape, even now crumbling;
Bulk that one held a burden and a name,
Hulk where log-worms now wouldn’t find a home.


Strange how such a dead thing divides
So neatly the present from the past,
Itself a blending that derides
Our careful emptiness and our last
Lost selves. One minute we were nothing,


Then dredged up on the shore this something
No-thing, once of the sea and still a part,
>Niched in the sand but alien and glittering:
Lost anger stranded in a quiet heart.

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The book’s intro was written by Edith’s daughter, Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, herself a multi-awarded fictionist. Rowena’s description of her mother’s work is itself an exquisite work of art. Here are portions of it.

"My mother writes poetry much the same the violets in her garden grow - and the other living, well-loved things in her care as well: the furious secret mysterious processes taking place unobtrusively underneath the carefully tended balance of sun and shade and a gentle land, with lots of open space. Always the open space, the door to her study that is never shut; where rhythm, though ‘prisoner/In the careful cage’ keeps mainly to the metrics picked up by a fine inner ear from the wind on a mountainside, the crickets at dusk, a noisy city side-street.

"I’ve sometimes wondered if the deceptive effortlessness in the appearance of my mother’s poems was arrived at without a lot of unseen struggle; while the rest of us perform that same juggling act in serio-comic awkwardness, she balances all the pins (and pens), and the angels dancing on them as well: writing the menu and the marketing lists, marking students’ papers, cutting through the plethora of university administrative paperwork, while giving total ear to her teenagers’ transitory head - and heart-aches. One wonders what her poems would have been like (if there would have been poems at all), had the household been like, say, Anne Sexton’s, where at certain hours of the morning the children tiptoed about: ‘Shh, Mommy’s writing a poem,’ and everyone felt faintly guilty, not least the poet herself, at the intrusion of the mundane necessities - life breaking into the poetry as it were, where perhaps it should have been the other way around.

"At marvelously unpredictable intervals my mother’s poems appeared, breaking into life with a certain wondering silence at the heart of each of them, and no distracted, inattentive look to signal their coming. She probably wrote many of them on the run, but the breathless quality poems from their durable and enduring sense of discovery: that ‘The merest thing is magic.’

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My e-mail: [email protected]