Pimentel questions P78-M Comelec printing deal with ACM bidder

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. questioned yesterday the Commission on Elections’ (Comelec’s) decision to award a P78-million printing contract to a company whose owners have ties with another firm that won a Comelec contract found anomalous by the Supreme Court (SC).

Multi-Forms Corp. was declared the winning bidder by the Comelec on Sept. 4, beating 20 other accredited private printers of the National Printing Office for the contract to print voters’ registration forms and ID cards.

However, the Comelec’s decision to award the contract to Multi-Forms came under Pimentel’s scrutiny.

Pimentel said it would be difficult to justify how Multi-Forms bagged the contract because the firm is owned by two of the eight incorporators of Mega Pacific eSolutions Inc. (MPEI), which was behind the P1.3-billion deal to supply automated counting machines (ACMs) declared null and void by the SC in 2004.

Multi-Forms is owned by Mega Pacific incorporators Johnson Fong and his son, Bernardo, according to Pimentel. The elder Fong is the president of Multi-Forms while his son helps run the family-owned firm.

Comelec Chairman Benjamin Abalos justified the contract awarding.

He said Multi-Forms should not be disqualified from the bidding because "in doing business, you do not deal with the individual stockholders, you deal with the incorporators" even if the Fongs in Multi-Forms were the same ones in Mega Pacific.

In January 2004, the SC nullified Mega Pacific’s Comelec contract for the purchase of 1,991 automated counting machines — meant for tallying results in the presidential election in May that year — citing irregularities in the contract awarding.

It said the Comelec violated its own bidding rules and that the firm was not qualified. The court ruled that the government take back the money paid to Mega Pacific. It also ordered an investigation of officials involved for possible liability.

Pimentel said Mega Pacific’s incorporators should have been blacklisted by the Comelec from bidding for its contracts for failing to give back the money paid for the ACMs instead of being awarded more government deals.

He charged that company officials dissolved Mega Pacific in an apparent bid to evade the court’s refund order.

"It is sad that Comelec officials have decided to brazen it out with the people by awarding the contract to a Mega Pacific kin. This is another nail in the coffin Comelec officials concerned are building for themselves. Delicadeza (sense of propriety) is again a victim here," he said.

Pimentel said the recent Comelec move "behooves the government authorities to scrutinize the contract not only for outright anomalies but for the propriety of it."

The Comelec should be running after the Fongs and other Mega Pacific incorporators for not refunding the money paid for the ACMs, now lying idle in storage.

Pimentel said Abalos apparently overlooked that the refund of the payment for the invalidated automation contract is a collective, corporate obligation of the incorporators that they could not shirk from.

The other incorporators of Mega Pacific are Willy Yu, Bonnie Yu, Enrique Tansipek, Rosita Tansipek, Pedro Tan and Lauriano Barrios.

The 2004 court ruling on Mega Pacific’s contract inadvertently derailed government plans to modernize the country’s antiquated electoral system, which is riddled with opportunities for poll fraud. It takes election officials weeks to complete the counting of votes.

It forced election officials to revert to the manual counting of votes and initially sparked concern that the 2004 elections would be postponed.