Panganiban says Marcos pushed for sugar importation through selected traders
MANILA, Philippines — Agriculture Senior Undersecretary Domingo Panganiban said Tuesday before the Senate Blue Ribbon panel that President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. directed the importation of sugar through selected traders.
Pressed by Sen. Francis Tolentino to clarify what Marcos told him after a Cabinet meeting, Panganiban said the president directed him to “import through selected importers of sugar.”
Panganiban relayed to the committee that Marcos told him in that call that sugar inflation is high which prompted the president to recommend the immediate importation of the sweetener to arrest its price in the market.
“Let’s do it ourselves first,” Panganiban said partly in Filipino. “And so, two days after, he (Marcos) called again a meeting with me and several sugar importers, and he told the same thing.”
“And so after one hour of deliberations, the president said, ‘Let’s import.’ Tell the public we should be importing,” he said.
But when asked to clarify by Sen. Risa Hontiveros and Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III, Panganiban quickly changed his tune and claimed that he did not say the president stated “let’s do it ourselves first.”
“He (Marcos) did not say let’s do it ourselves. I was the one who said, ‘Let’s do it ourselves.’ What the president said was, ‘Let’s import,’” Panganiban said.
Capable companies?
Panganiban was unable to answer how the sugar traders were selected as he deferred to the Sugar Regulatory Administration. But the SRA’s chief, Pablo Luis Azcona, who was just appointed around a month ago, said he had no personal knowledge of how this happened.
The senior agriculture official said Marcos directed to limit sugar allocations “to a few importers who are willing to shoulder warehousing, transportation and other related costs and to sell it at reasonable price to manage inflation.”
In February, Panganiban told a news briefing in Malacañang that upon the directive of Marcos to address inflation and create a buffer stock of sugar, he told three capable and accredited companies to proceed with sugar importation.
These three companies were Sucden Philippines Inc., Edison Lee Marketing Corp. and All Asian Countertrade Inc.
But the qualifications of these companies were questioned by Hontiveros, as she presented during the Senate hearing an independent auditors’ report which showed Sucden had a capital deficiency of $394,103 and $35,784 at the end of 2021 and 2020, respectively, due to “continuing losses.”
Hontiveros also said AllAsian has a “long history of smuggling,” a record of defaults with Coca-Cola and a lawsuit against them filed by Nestle.
Sucden president Christian Emmanuel Alvarado confirmed the veracity of the report, attributing their “bad performance” on a program that required them to buy “very expensive local sugar” for exporting to the US. He added that they earned in the past year.
AllAsian, meanwhile, denied that they are smugglers, saying they have so far paid P800 million in smuggling.
"We cannot call that smuggling. Because we paid taxes. You only call smugglers those who don't pay tax," AllAsian chairperson Michael Escaler said.
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