EDITORIAL - Cursing the day they came to RP

When multinational company Smartmatic partnered with Filipino firm Total Information Management Corporation to form a consortium that eventually won the Comelec contract to automate the May 10 Philippine elections, the main objective was of course to make money.

And make money it did, lots of it. The contract price, after all, was a whooping P7.2 billion. But if you think Smartmatic TIM is whistling its way to the bank, better think again. It is, to its eternal regret, now mired in a congressional investigation instead.

It seems that far worse than the glitches that made the election a real cliff-hanger, allegations of fraud made largely by losing candidates forced the foreign officials of Smartmatic TIM to endure verbal abuse on live national television.

At one point in the investigation, Rep. Teddyboy Locsin, chairman of the House committee on suffrage conducting the hearings, blew his top and, pointing a fat finger at the Venezuelan nationals, called them "sons of bitches."

The language was, of course, unparliamentary and had to be stricken off the records. But little did that, and a subsequent apology from Locsin, do to calm the frayed nerves of the foreigners, who must have cursed the day they decided to do business in a country like this.

For no business can be messier than an election, and no place is worse to do a messy business as an election than in the Philippines, where winners are the real losers, and all losers never lost -- they just got cheated.

When the earlier glitches made the collective heart of Filipinos stop, Smartmatic TIM president Cesar Flores did the foolish thing of handing over his passport to show he was not fleeing his responsibilities. How he must have regretted his bravado.

Long before this is all over, people will be reminded of how the country cancelled its 1999 contract with Fraport A.G. of Germany to build a new airport terminal in Manila that saddled it with hundred of millions of dollars in losses and an arbitration suit with the World Bank.

Normal business standards that apply in other countries do not apply in the Philippines. Investors who come in expect to make money in the process, not end up in a political circus where they are stripped of all dignity, wondering if they will ever come out of the experience alive.