Until we meet again

October 31, 2011 is a day that I will always remember because it scarred me for life.

I lost someone I love dearly to heart attack. It was all so sudden that until now, I couldn’t believe it that he is gone.

For the past 13 years, he has been my knight in shining armor, my strength, my angel, always there just supporting me one hundred percent in everything that I wanted to achieve. He unselfishly did everything for me, not expecting anything in return. He loved me unconditionally.

I do not know how I can continue in this life’s journey without him. I don’t even know how to get to Ateneo in Rockwell. I don’t even know where to park. I have taken it for granted that he drops me off, picks me up. My family has depended on him for everything, not financially, but for small things like replacing the light bulb, fixing the broken pipe, fixing the car, going to the supermarket, preparing the meals. Now that he’s gone, all that now becomes my responsibility and I am at a loss.

But more than all these, he has sacrificed so much in his life just to make my, and our lives, easier. Friends remember him as the take charge kind of guy. That’s how great he is. Even now, I know that he’s just there, guiding me as he always did.

He has always been my rock, my strength. He just let me fly my wings and as the song goes, he was the wind beneath my wings. Everything I am today, I owe it to him.

I was never able to thank him enough for everything. When I arrived at the hospital, he was gone.

I thought it was too much of a cliché when people say never forget to tell someone how much you love them because you’ll never know if you will still have that chance. I never got that chance.

I know that he is now in a better place, away from all the heartaches and hardships of this world. I want to believe that God has a purpose for taking him away this early and I know that one day, I’ll find out why?

PDA to be abolished?

 In support of Malacañang’s austerity program, Congress should speed up the passage of a bill co-authored by House Reps. Rufus Rodriguez and Maximo Rodriguez Jr. that seeks to close down 36 of the country’s 120 government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCCs) and government financial institutions (GFIs) that are “unnecessary, underperforming and losing” in keeping with its austerity program.

One of these 36 corporations targeted by House Bill 2867 is the Partido Development Administration (PDA), which operates in the fourth district of Camarines Sur that is represented in Congress by Deputy Speaker Arnulfo Fuentebella.

A Commission on Audit (COA) report shows that PDA had absorbed over P100 million in losses over a two-year period alone—P33.35 million in 2009 and P66.25 million in 2008.

Even more alarming is its combined foreign loan and national debt of more than P1 billion, which has been absorbed by the national government—yes, to be paid by us taxpayers—because the PDA can no longer service these obligations. Last year, for instance, PDA’s payables totaled P585.5 million, representing the initial loan amortizations and guarantees that the national government has had to advance because of the corporation’s inability to do so.

Such payables were for the loans and interest payments incurred by the PDA from loans it secured in 1999 from the Danish International Development Agency (Danida), EKF Guarantee and ABN AMRO Bank to bankroll its Partido Water Supply System (PWSS) project. As a result of PDA’s mismanagement, the water rates being paid by CamSur’s PWSS consumers are the highest in the province.

On the strength of this COA report, CamSur Gov. Luis Raymund “L-Ray” Villafuerte Jr. has formally asked President Aquino to abolish the PDA.

And while we are still in the topic of CamSur, it turns out that the wheeler-dealer George Triviño has resurfaced more than a decade after the Public Estate Authority (PEA)-Amari rip-off—better known as the “grandmother of all scams”—this time in the Fuentebella’s home district as the prime mover behind an energy project.

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents show that Triviño is one of the five incorporators of the Caramoan Dam HydroElectric Power Corp., which aims to set up shop in Fuentebella’s Partido district that is supposed to be under the supervision of the PDA.

Triviño, had figured prominently in the scandal involving the Amari Coastal Bay Resources Corp., a Thai-Filipino company that entered into a P1.8 billion contract with the government via the Philippine Estates Authority (PEA) to buy reclaimed property off the Manila-Cavite coastal road in 1995. 

Triviño was named in one prize-winning report of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) as having received P300 million, or a 10th of the over P3 billion in bribes that several government officials and private individuals have received to get the PEA-Amari project going during the Ramos administration.

This PCIJ report had described Triviño as a convicted gold smuggler with “a long history of wheeling and dealing” with underworld financiers and shady politicians and bureaucrats.

According to the PCIJ report, Triviño was able to move to Asia and eventually to the Philippines, where he was able to befriend the powers-that-be in the world of corrupt politics. In the course of the Senate investigation into the PEA-Amari scandal, Triviño described then Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. as an “old friend.”

Sixteen years later after that scam, Triviño has resurfaced and reinvented himself as an energy businessman in Fuentebella’s Partido district.

Now let’s get back to our topic. Almost 15 years after the PDA opened shop to oversee growth and development in Fuentebella’s Partido district, five of its municipalities—Tigaon, Siruma, Tinambac, Garchitorena and Presentacion—remain on the poverty index of the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) as among the poorest in the province.

Tigaon is the Fuentebellas’ hometown and where the deputy speaker’s son, Arnulf Bryan, is mayor. Tigaon has been classified too by the NSCB as one of the country’s worst governed local government units, and is also the proposed capital of the envisioned new province of Nueva Camarines, which the deputy speaker wants to carve out of CamSur in his highly unpopular HB 4820 that had been railroaded through the House of Representatives.

The PDA, according to the COA audit, operated five business ventures: the PTV 4 Goa, Nato Port, Center for Human Resources Development, Printshop and the PWSS. Except for the PWSS, the other four entities have already closed shop because of mismanagement.

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