Toxic beauty

Did you know 1: Ampalaya or bitter gourd is one of the raw materials that Chinese pharmaceutical company Seeinglong Biodiversity will be using when it puts up a multimillion-dollar plant in the country.

Seeinglong will use the Philippines as a regional hub to manufacture alternative medicines (read: herbal) for such ailments as diabetes and cancer.

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Did you know 2: That the P300-million Cleanway Technology Corp. (which treats the toxic waste of industrial parks near its Cavite facility) has red-flowering bougainvillas near its entrance and, in the future, koi swimming in treated water is not so much the idea of major investor Herman Esguerra (whose major business is trucking petroleum all over the country) as that of president and chief marketing officer Elizabeth Locsin.

The plant will be inaugurated by President Macapagal-Arroyo next month and will hopefully break even eight years after.

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Well, Commission on Audit chairman Guillermo Carague remains unpopular with his own people two years after implementing a reorganization that didn’t get anybody fired but did reassign a lot of people in the name of efficiency.

Fact is, there’s an ongoing petition with the Supreme Court to declare the reorganization – the basis for which was a study which was conducted through a grant from the United Nations Development Programme – null and avoid. Interestingly, the petitioners are former CoA chairmen and commissioners led by Eugemio Dominguez and their lawyer is former Justice Secretary Sedfrey Ordoñez.

On Gem Carague’s side is Solicitor-General Alfredo Benipayo.

Basically, Mr. Dominguez’s group believes that any massive reorganization of the CoA must have an enabling law, something along the lines of, say, the 1993 Bangko Sentral Act, which amended the 1949 Central Bank of the Philippines Act.

Mr. Carague, a former member of the Monetary Board and a former Budget Secretary, believes the reorganization is in keeping with the CoA charter, which stresses its fiscal autonomy or independence (again along the same lines as the Bangko Sentral) so that it can perform its duty as government’s auditing watchdog.

Oh yes, another group made up of current CoA employees has piggybacked on the petition of the Mr. Dominguezís group. This group – made up of Maria Matib, Rachel Pacpaco, Angelo Sanchez, and Sherwin Sipi-An – feel the reorganization has, in effect, "demoted" them and has led to the reduction of their representation and transportation allowances or RATA.

Mr. Carague claims that the realignment of the RATA of these CoA auditors was due to the audit team approach implemented by his predecessor, Celso Gangan.

Basically, the audit team approach utilizes an independent audit team to supplement that of the CoA-assigned resident auditing unit posted in each government agency. Once its job is done, the independent audit team is pulled out from the premises of the agency.