CALAX issue: Integrity of PPP at stake

I’m getting numerous reports, especially from social networking sites about the pesky 5-hour blackouts happening in Metro Manila and many parts of Luzon. Worse news is that the rains that Typhoon Henry brought wasn’t enough to fill up the low levels of the dams in Luzon. Call it a sad commentary on President Aquino that he is following the exact same path of his mother, President Cory Aquino in the last two years of her administration where it was characterized by blackouts that brought down the economy.

Of course, Tita Cory and her minions refused to operate the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) because it was supposed to be a “corrupt” deal and she also believed in the yarn that the BNPP was on top of an earthquake fault. So in the end, she denied Filipinos the cheapest form of energy that we could get at that time. Meanwhile, the Republic of Korea bought the twin sister of the BNPP and operated it in Yongbyon. Today it is still operational and giving Koreans cheap energy so they could manufacture those refrigerators, cellphones and cars and sell them to the Philippines.

If you want to fix our power problems, all we need is money, lots and lots of money, after all, power plants do cost a lot of money. But above all, there has to be some kind of vision as to where those power plants would be put up. It’s a no-brainer as to where those power plants are needed the most. But this is the sad commentary on the Aquino regime… it has not caught up with today’s reality that a strong economy needs power plants.

A couple of days ago, I heard Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla explain to the press why Metro Manila was having 5-hour blackouts and the bottomline was lack of investments in the power sector in the last four years. Come now…President Aquino was already in power four years ago, yet he didn’t care to solve the power needs of Mindanao which has been suffering 8-hour rotating blackouts…but then that’s Mindanao, which is the farthest from the mind of P-Noy. But for a President to allow 5-hour blackouts in Metro Manila are a mortal sin…it’s even sacrilegious!

While this is the bad news coming from the Aquino regime, last Monday we read the good news on our power situation coming from the Aboitiz Power Corp. (AboitizPower) that it has set aside some P90 billion for power generation projects by 2017. These projects are for a 400MW pulverized coal-fired expansion unit in Pagbilao, Quezon Province for Luzon at a projected cost of P44 billion. For Mindanao, they have set aside P13 billion for a 68-MW Manolo Fortich hydropower project and for Cebu, they are putting up a 300-MW Cebu coal project worth P32 billion.

If today AboitizPower has grown by leaps and bounds, it is due to the fact that they have focused their core business in power generation. This is why they painstakingly let go of their maritime business under 2GO and I believe that they did the right thing. While we in Cebu are not experiencing any rotating blackouts, this report from AboitizPower that they are putting up a 300MW Clean Coal project is very timely and will assure Cebuanos of continued economic growth after P-Noy leaves Malacañang.

But it’s not really all good news for our friends at the Aboitiz Corp. I was still out on vacation when we learned that AC Infrastructure Holdings Corp. and Aboitiz Land, Inc., members of the Team Orion (Orion) consortium that submitted the highest complying bid for the Cavite-Laguna Expressway Project (CALAX) Toll Road for P35.4 billion and paid a concession payment of P11.659 billion for this PPP project.

So this is supposed to be a done deal as the Team Orion Consortium won the CALAX bid fair and square. But then the 4th bidder, Optimal Infrastructure Development Corp., a subsidiary of San Miguel Corp. was disqualified on the ground that its bid security fell short of the four days for the 180 days required by DPWH. Optimal Infrastructure then contested their disqualification making an appeal to President Aquino seeking to reverse its disqualification by the DPWH SBAC.

What we gathered was that DPWH Secretary Rogelio Singson was present in that bidding and when Optimal was disqualified, they were supposed to remove their documents from the DPWH. While initially the SMC lawyers walked out of this, they came back to the DPWH and verbally announced that their bid was for P20.105 billion. This was highly irregular because the other bids were not opened yet. Was Optimal playing fair? I don’t think so!

Let me point out clearly that the Aquino regime’s reputation these days are in tatters thanks to the pork scam and the DAP issue. But the PPP projects have kept a very high-level of integrity. It would be disastrous for the President to go against his DPWH Secretary just because he found out that the Optimal bid was P8 billion more. But then who knows that their lawyers could have jacked up their bids, after all DPWH never saw their bid.

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