NMI, PNCC war continues

How true is it that Next Mobile Inc. (NMI) is contemplating filing both criminal and administrative charges against officials of the Philippine National Construction Corp. (PNCC) for what is obviously a rigging by the latter of the results of its bidding for radio communications system for the South Luzon Tollways Group?

It appears that Contel won in the bidding to provide the radio communications system despite the fact that the bidding specifications were very clear that the services needed cannot be provided by a trunk radio operator like Contel that still uses analog technology.

Next Mobile, in a recent letter to PNCC chairman and acting president Pastor Ramos, noted that while it is true that PNCC "has the right to reject any and/or all bids" as stated in its request for quotation, the fact remains that the specifications set therein, specifically those referring to the ability to make cellular calls (implying full-duplex interconnect calls and not telephone-radio patch) and security from cloning were not met and, therefore, misled NMI, not to mention excluding other potential bidders who have restrained from submitting their own bids for failure to meet these requirements.

What’s worse, NMI requested for copies of the bids tendered, as well as the award document,but this was denied by a certain Moses Pangilinan of PNCC’s materials management division. And according to Pangilinan, he has his instructions from one Yolanda Mortel, a deviation from the transparency of bidding procedures of this nature.

NMI better do what it needs to do in order to put the erring officers behind bars.

Investigate Bank Charges

I couldn’t agree more with Senator Mar when he called on the Senate to investigate the excessive charges being imposed by banks on the remittances of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to protect them from possible abuses.

According to Senator Mar, one local bank collects a $6 fee for each remittance coursed through a subsidiary in the United States. Assuming the OFW concerned sends money home at least once a month, at $6 for each transfer, over 12 months, he or she would have spent a total of $72 (or P4,000), which is equivalent to 16 days minimum wage here, he said.

He pointed out that considering advances in technology, surely there is room for reduction in fees without eroding the profitability of those engaged in the remittance trade. In fact, remittances can now be facilitated simply via intercontinental mobile telephone text messaging.

Isn’t it about time that an investigation be conducted, not only on charges on OFW remittances, but those imposed on all transactions, whether simple or complicated. Take the case of BPI for instance. It charges P100 everytime you deposit money over the counter to an account in a BPI branch outside of Bulacan and Laguna, which practically covers all areas in the north and south. And that’s just for Luzon.

Those who maintain a dollar account would know how expensive it is to maintain such an account. Everytime your account drops to below the $500 minimum, they charge you $5. This means that an OFW who sends money to the Philippines spends not only $6 for every transfer made. He also has to make sure that the dollar account his wife maintains to receive his remittances does not fall below $500 or he will have to pay another $5.

Senator Mar should probably expand the investigation to include all kinds of charges, with particular emphasis on inter-bank ATM transactions.

Annual OFW remittances have grown from only $103 million in 1975 to $8.5 billion last year, making the Philippines the third largest recipient of migrant remittances, next to India and Mexico.

Western Hemisphere leaders, at the Special Summit of the Americas in Monterey, Mexico, last year called for the cost of remittances to be cut in half by 2008. The finance and central bank chiefs of the Group of Seven – the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan – have declared that they will continue to work on initiatives to reduce barriers that raise the cost of sending remittances and to integrate remittance services in the formal financial sector.

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