Lawmaker: Take down ‘no trespassing’ sign to foreign investors

MANILA, Philippines — It’s high time that the country’s 34-year-old virtual and clearly implied “no trespassing” sign to foreign investors is removed, so that the economy can flourish and the exodus of Filipinos seeking greener pastures abroad can be stopped, according to a member of the House of Representatives.

“Just put yourself in the position of someone looking to open a business. It is important that you can find a place to put up your business. But here, we already have our ‘no trespassing’ label on our doors,” Marikina City Rep. Stella Luz Quimbo said.

“If potential foreign investors cannot own the capital they invest into the country, then they are likely to look elsewhere,” the deputy minority leader, a former professor at the UP School of Economics, added.

In her sponsorship speech defending the Resolution of Both Houses 2 (RBH 2) authored by Speaker Lord Allan Velasco before the plenary debates, Quimbo said Charter change (Cha-cha) is necessary to bring in foreign capital as well as our overseas Filipino workers back home.

“When a country’s domestic capital is lacking, we simply need to look for more foreign business partners. Unfortunately, our laws are too restrictive to allow the inflow of foreign capital,” she said.

But as far as Camarines Sur second  district Rep. LRay Villafuerte is concerned, efforts by the House leadership to amend restrictive economic provisions in the 1987 Constitution face a blank wall in the Senate.