NAIA-3 can’t open despite GMA order

If anyone knows the Piatco-Fraport story inside out, it’s Rep. Salacnib Baterina. It was he who in 2002 bared in Congress a multibillion-peso fraud in the build-operate contract for NAIA Terminal-3, and in 2003 got the Supreme Court to cancel it. It is also he who smells a rat in recent twists of the case.

The big poser for Baterina is why government filed an expropriation case for the facility to begin with. By law, expropriation applies to private property to be seized for state use upon payment of just compensation. In this case, the government’s Bases Conversion Development Authority owns the land on which the terminal rose. Too, there’s no need to recompense Piatco-Fraport since the Tribunal declared the contract void ab initio. What government should have filed instead in the Pasay City court was a case for recovery of possession. Plus, in the Sandiganbayan, a plunder suit against the builders and the officials they bribed for favorable terms.

Baterina sought to set things right last Friday by asking Judge Jesus Mupas to dismiss the expropriation rap. Through lawyer Jose Bernas, he argued that landowner BCDA was not even included either as plaintiff or defendant. Bernas also presented withdrawal slips by Piatco head Cheng Yong from the $4.4-million bank account of bagman Alfonso Liongson, apparently to bribe officials. The evidence of corruption should negate any need for just compensation.

Judge Mupas ignored Baterina’s twin moves. For, three days earlier on Tuesday, he already signed a decision, though still in the mail, denying the congressman’s petition to intervene as a concerned citizen. Meaning, in the eyes of the court, Baterina does not exist. The denial is strange. Not only had Mupas’s predecessor, murdered Judge Henrick Guingoyon, already accepted Baterina’s intervention, but Mupas himself in past hearings had recognized Baterina by seeking his comments on legal issues. Also denied intervention roles were Takenaka Corp. of Japan, which as contractor is collecting $100 million in civil works, and Asian Emerging Dragons Corp., the original project proponent that Piatco nosed out through brinery.

That was not the only rapid-fire action of Mupas last week. On Monday he denied the plea of the government to move into NAIA-3 as soon as it gives to Piatco the P3 billion that Guingoyon, before his fatal shooting last Jan., ordered as down payment. And on Wednesday he also ordered the court sheriff to withdraw the P3 billion from the government bank for delivery to Piatco.

There’s another weird twist here. Piatco, which Mupas ordered the government to remunerate P3 billion for starters, does not even accept the court’s jurisdiction over it. Instead it had filed a separate arbitration in Singapore for reimbursement of $565 million in supposed "actual expenses". The RP government in turn should not have recognized the Singapore court for beginning to question the validity of the Supreme Court ruling. But it did bring itself under Singapore jurisdiction, and thus now faces two collection suits from Piatco – one of which the government itself initiated in the Pasay court.

And there’s another arbitration, this time in Washington DC, filed by Fraport for collection of $425 million, also for "actual expenses". In Dec. 2004 the RP government declared at the opening hearing that Fraport and Piatco had committed fraud and that the structure it built was worthlessly defective. Four days later, however, it also filed for expropriation in Pasay. This practically weakened the government position in Washington, where legal experts naturally will interpret expropriation to mean there was no fraud involved and that the structure is usable.

For four years Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has been expressing a desire to open NAIA-3 for increased passenger and cargo traffic. Normally when a President declares an aim, aides and cabinet members jump to implement. Not in the Piatco-Fraport case. Here, three cases are moving fast in all directions except in government’s favor. Could it be because the President’s men are trying hard to lose the cases?

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Feeling alluded to in my item on a US embassy probe of visa fraud, DOTC head executive assistant Romeo German replied through his cousin. He blamed the DOTC Employees Association, which used to append the name Renegades, for the intrigues against him and Asst. Sec. Noel Cruz.

German stressed several points:

(1) He never charged his California travel expenses to the DOTC or to Sec. Leandro Mendoza’s intelligence fund, as attested by the Accounting Office. He personally shouldered his and companion Maria Waneza Dy’s plane fares, food and hotel accommodations.

(Strangely, it was the Accounting Office that first leaked the supposed travel charges not only in California on July 18-Aug. 2 but also in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur on Apr. 26-May 1).

(2) He never secured a travel authority for Ms Dy, who is not a DOTC employee in the first place. It’s his accusers who falsified documents and forged Mendoza’s signature on the travel authority.

(The travel authority of German has bar code number 06-04764; Dy’s has 06-04719. Both bear Mendoza’s signature apparently lifted from a computer scan. German makes no mention of the certificate of employment allegedly issued by Asec. Cruz to facilitate Dy’s application for a US visa.)

(3) He is a bachelor, never been married to anyone in any church or civil rite anywhere in the world. He private life is his business and should not be the concern of anyone else, most especially those who accuse him of wrongdoing in bringing a companion to his trips.

(4) Contrary to a complaint filed by the DOTC-EA, Dy is not a bargirl but a college grad with a degree in hotel and restaurant manager and plans to pursue further studies. She is not pregnant, and the report that German talked to her parents about an abortion is "downright absurd."

(5) The "vicious, malicious" harassment are being done because German and Asec. Cruz have blocked spurious transactions being pushed by those behind the complaint.

(The complaint alleges that Cruz has been bragging about having convinced Mendoza to take out an insurance policy for the MRT-3, for which he supposedly personally delivered $500,000 in commissions to his boss.)

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