80,000 Soldiers vs 8,000 Moro Rebels - Gotcha

Did you catch it on TV? The Army lieutenant whose Basilan outpost 500 Moro secessionists tried to overrun Tuesday admitted he had only 19 men. It was a terribly undersized platoon, which should have 50 regulars.

Dramatically like Lt. Hanley (Ric Jason) and his ragtag Combat troop, the Basilan unit was able to repulse the Krauts after two hours of fierce fighting. Still, the newsclip left televiewers wondering: Are real Army companies and battalions undersized too?

Seems so. A full company should have 200 to 250 men; a battalion, 1,000 or so. The AFP dispatched Wednesday two battalions from Leyte, totalling 1,000 men, to reinforce six battalions in the Maguindanao-Lanao battlefront. It said it will deploy two more battalions of 1,000 fresh recruits from Manila. That means each reinforcing battalion is terribly undersized at only 500 men. The same presumably goes for the six battalions already in place: 3,000 soldiers. Pulling out 220 Marines from Metro Manila mall patrol and replacing them with airmen won't suffice to fill the deficit.

Malacañang has estimated that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has 7,000 armed secessionists, half of whom are in Maguindanao-Lanao. That means the Army has 5,000 men against MILF's 3,500. Is that enough for the AFP to fulfill Joseph Estrada's wish to win the war?

Well, Estrada says it's an all-out war, so it must be. Defense officials also claimed Wednesday that 80,000 soldiers, over half the AFP's strength, are now deployed in Mindanao. That includes Navy sailors, Air Force pilots, doctors and nurses, and ship and aircraft maintenance crew. Also on government's side are tens of thousands of policemen and militiamen, and about 2,000 former Moro National Liberation Front rebels.

On the enemy side, aside from MILF's 7,000, are 300 Abu Sayyaf religious extremists in Basilan and 500 more in Sulu. AFP estimates the communist New People's Army's Mindanao strength at 1,000 regulars. The NPA has a tactical alliance with MILF for santuary when pursued by government troops.

AFP says MILF in Maguindanao-Lanao is running low on bullets, thus its retreat from Narciso Ramos Highway into Camp Abubakar. But MILF is threatening to bring the war to Metro Manila, where troops are busy guarding Congress, Malacanang and city limits from NPA offensives. The Navy and Air Force are also busy patrolling territorial waters against Chinese poachers and island-grabbers.

Meantime, 101 soldiers have been killed; 300,000 civilians have fled or lost their homes from the fighting. If only this all-out war were as well-scripted as Combat.

Eight readers have pointed out over the past weeks that the fight for minority protection in publicly-listed Interphil Laboratories is similar to Sime Darby-Pilipinas shareholders' revolt about this time two years ago.

In that hot case, Filipino minority shareholders questioned the foreign majority's investment of Sime Darby's cash in overseas sister-firms instead of paying out dividends. They complained to the Securities and Exchange Commission that the investments aimed to revive the foreigner's losing sister-firms, which the Filipino minority had no business to save. They added that the foreign majority also sank Sime Darby's money into real estate -- against the Constitution's land-ownership limit to Filipinos.

Sime Darby-Pilipinas at that time was 60 percent-owned by Sime Darby Far East Ltd., a subsidiary of the Malaysian conglomerate Sime Darby Bhd. The 40 percent was held by fund managers for 1,300 Filipino investors. The foreign-dominated board had bought 51 percent of losing Lee Refrigeration PLC, another subsidiary of Sime Darby Bhd. The Filipinos protested Sime Darby Bhd.'s use of their money in the less-than-fully owned Sime Darby-Pilipinas to prop up its fully-owned but losing subsidiaries. Demanding full disclosure of other foreigner decisions to SEC, they found out about the real estate deals.

Sime Darby-Pilipinas' foreign majority had formed a subsidiary called Sime Darby Realty. At the same time, it formed a joint venture called Siltown with Sime Darby Retirement Fund, which is 85 percent-owned by Sime Darby Bhd. At the bottom of the pyramid, Sime Darby Realty and Siltown formed Green East Prime Ventures to buy and develop land in Rizal. The Filipino owners said the dummies not only violated the law on land ownership but also dissipated Sime Darby-Pilipinas' cash which should have been returned to them as investors' dividends. They claimed that Green East bought land at P1,260 per sqm. although an independent appraiser valued it at only P900.

In Interphil, Filipino minority shareholders are complaining to SEC that the Swiss majority is funneling company funds into sweetheart deals with sister firms. That's why, they say, Interphil hardly makes net profit, despite multibillion-peso revenues from making and packaging 90 percent of medicines sold in RP.

Interphil is 70 percent-owned by Zuellig Group through Zuellig Corp. (11 percent), Zuellig Pharma (32 percent), Interpharma (25 percent), and management proxies (two percent). Zuellig Corp. owns 99.8 percent of Interpharma and 99.99 percent of Zuellig Pharma. A handful of Filipino fund managers hold Interphil's remaining 30 percent. But they represent millions of shareholders; one fund manager is GSIS, which has 1.5 million government employees as members and 7.5 million dependents.

Interphil's Filipino minority complains that the company lost P300 million in 1998 alone because the Zuellig-controlled board signed hefty contracts for management with Interpharma, warehousing with Zuellig Pharma, and insurance with Federal Phoenix Assurance, another Zuellig Group member. They aver that the warehousing deal was overpriced and computed not only on floor space occupied but also on the air space above. This, they say, when Interphil has idle warehouses of its own. They add that the insurance deal was not only overpriced, as shown by competitors' bids, but also brokered by another Zuellig subsidiary, Zuellig Brokers.

Interestingly, the readers pointed out, the chairman of Sime Darby-Pilipinas in 1998 is also the chairman of Zuellig-controlled Interphil at present. The readers agreed that while the Interphil minority shareholders' fight for investment protection is their own, the interest of GSIS members is a public issue not only for SEC but also Malacanang to resolve.

Interphil charges one of the highest toll-manufacturing rates in East Asia, thus contributing to high medicine costs. GSIS members need to know not only how their money is being used in Interphil, but also how they can influence prices of medicines.

INTERACTION. Ben Artiaga, BF-Paranaque: Sen. Pimentel should've ended his moro-moro investigation of PCSO (Gotcha, 13 May 2000) with a recommendation to prosecute Sr. Christine Tan for telling the world about the First Family's cornering of funds at the expense of usual charities.

Don't give him ideas, Ben.

Trennie Monsod, quickweb.com: I'll bet my retirement pay that our legislators will rush to pass a law against computer hacking that will reflect their overreaction to the I-Love-You virus (Gotcha, 15 May 2000). The law will be in inverse proportion to their understanding of the issue.

You win, Trennie.

Benjie Alvarez, BF-Paranaque: Erap should be made accountable for all damages from the war in Mindanao. He ordered it to gratify machismo ("Mag-Presidente muna sila"), brushing aside public opinion that the military solution will only worsen things.

Rico Xeres, San Juan: RP has the biggest migrant population in the world, with 5-7 million overseas workers. Government has failed to attract local and foreign investors who would hire Filipinos. The problem is management; our government is inefficient. We probably have the largest bureaucracy in proportion to population. We have the biggest public works department in East Asia, but our only highway is a stretch from Laguna to Pampanga.

YOUR BODY. A study of male children born without penises and raised as girls found that most of them considered themselves boys when they got older -- suggesting that gender identity is determined in the womb. For more, visit cnn.com/health.

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