Pag-Ibig calamity loans for Cebu victims rise to P380M

CEBU, Philippines - The Pag-Ibig Fund — Visayas has initially released a total of P380 million calamity loans to its 35,7211 members in Cebu following the province’s “state of calamity” proclamation after the 7.2-magnitude earthquake last October 15, 2013.

In an interview, Pag-Ibig Fund vice president for Visayas Group Victoria B. De La Peña said this report is just an initial turnout on the agency’s effort to provide immediate calamity loans to members who are affected by the earthquake, excluding the pending applications of members affected by the super typhoon “Yolanda.”

This P380 million total released after October 15, 2013 is just for members who were able to get this special benefits in Northern and Southern Cebu areas.

According to De La Peña, the figure is seen to balloon in the next few years as applicants from the earthquake and typhoon disasters are coming in.

Pag-Ibig Fund has a total calamity loan window of P5 billion. However, because of the extent of the affected members, the agency is ready to put up additional amount if needed.

A special calamity program that is currently being reviewed will be given to Yolanda-affected members and will cover majority of the Visayas such as Eastern Visayas, Northern Cebu, Western Visayas and Negros Occidental.

There are a total of 1.3 million Pag-Ibig members in the Visayas region. About 68 thousand are identified to qualify in the special calamity loan offer of Pag-Ibig, she said.

For the Yolanda typhoon affected members, requirements are being relaxed and despite the lack of personnel to process the applications, De La Peña said the agency is doubling its effort to quicken the processing of the loans for immediate release.

Amount of calamity loan to be availed of by a member is equivalent to 80 percent of the total savings/contribution and dividend earnings, including employer’s counterpart of the member. Interest rate is slightly lower than the conventional credit facility offered by Pag-Ibig, like multi-purpose loan, and housing loan, among others.

Those members who work and reside under the areas that are proclaimed under “state of calamity” shall file their calamity loans for 90 days. In Metro Cebu, for instance, which was declared in the ‘state of calamity” after the earthquake, members can file their applications until January 15, 2014.

Processing and releasing of loans for typhoon victim members will run until February 8, 2014.

Although the Pag-Ibig Fund Region-8 office in Tacloban has already started its operation, she said a mini-office has been set up in Cebu to process the applications and concerns from Yolanda victims in Leyte, as the Tacloban office is still doing manual processing.

Conventionally, Pag-Ibig Fund’s loan processing will take three to four days from application to releasing. This time, however, processing will take an average of three weeks because of surge of applicants that make their filing every day.

After the earthquake, De La Peña said that the Pag-Ibig Fund (South) office located at the Ayala Business Park would average to service 1,000 calamity loan applications.  (FREEMAN)