While we’re all watching Bush & Blair bash Baghdad, billion-peso scams brewing here may get away unnoticed

Don’t sell the government’s 40 percent share in PETRON! Don’t furtively sell off the Philippine Amusements and Gaming Corp. (PAGCOR) to big, clandestine investors! Don’t sell the government’s stake in San Miguel Corporation! Don’t sell our irreplaceable overseas government properties, like Roppongi in Tokyo and other overseas real estate holdings (even the Philippine Center on Fifth Avenue in New York)!

What’s the expiring administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo up to? With only 14 months to go, why are GMA – no mention of Mike, of course – and her Money Men, like Finance Secretary Jose Isidro "Lito" Camacho, and, yes, feckless Trade and Industry Secretary Manuel "Mar" Roxas II in such a fantastic, fast-break hurry to peddle the nation’s "family jewels" – to already panting private buyers, who’re waiting in the wings?

If I didn’t believe GMA is an honest lady, one would be tempted to believe the critics, doubters and outright malicious when they say that La Presidenta and her cohorts are eager to ride off into the sunset with their saddlebags bulging with massive retirement funds. No, sir. The daughter of Cong Dadong, the idealistic Poor Boy from Lubao, would never do that!

What about her finance men? (Shame on you critics for viciously calling them "bagmen", those upright guys with wide-open smiles and well-manicured fingernails!) They have one obvious flaw, it’s true: They were previously investment bankers and investment brokers. You know the type. They sell everything off for their clients, then collect a hefty commission. Then they buy back everything for other clients, and again collect a hefty commission. They’re used to getting rich, coming and going. What about a case when they sell off – in a fire sale or auction "bargain sale", or okay, multibillion-buck swap meet – the Filipino people’s "family jewels"? Who gets rich while the Filipino people get poorer?

Since there’s going to be a new President, a new Cabinet, and a new Congress (parliament?) just a few months over a year from now, why not wait for the new, incoming Administration, or new Government? Why such a rush to get billions of pesos and dollars in ready cash? To fund, as DTI Secretary Mar Roxas claimed in a speech a few days ago to business chambers, or bankroll the massive infrastructure projects needed to "jumpstart" economic growth?

Roxas attempted to pass off the "urgent" big auction initiative of the GMA administration as "new generation ideas". C’mon, Mar. The same thing happened during the first two years of the post-Marcos, therefore post-EDSA Cory Administration, when we lost our best properties abroad at giveaway prices or "lawyers’ fees", and "auctioned off" our accumulated art treasures, silvers, etc., through Sotheby’s and Christie’s, because the government claimed the 20 years of Macoy-Imeldific rule had impoverished the treasury. The government always bleats it desperately needs money, while its leaders and the politicians blithely squander the budget.

The bargain-sale concept is not a new generation idea. Give us a break: We’ve heard such Barnum & Baily phrases like "jumpstart" the economy and massive "infrastructure projects" before.

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What amazed me about Mar, whom many had considered a leading candidate for much higher office in the future (the grandson of a great President, Don Manuel Acuña Roxas, and son of an impeccable Senate President, the late Gerry Roxas) is his rattling on in this manner.

He declared: "Much like we do in our families, we can liquidate an asset, even an heirloom, for the sole purpose of investing in our future." Sure, Mar. Why don’t you give us a personal example by selling off your family’s prized heirloom – the Araneta-Roxas family jewels, so to speak – namely, the Araneta Center? Not just Jorge, but the shade of your dynamic grandfather, the Last Tycoon, J. Amado "Amading" Araneta, might march out of the family mausoleum, a la Lazarus, not to smite you, perhaps, but give you an angry dressing down regarding your foolish views about business, finance, and the importance of meeting obligations and vindicating public trust.

Secretary Roxas, for instance, wants PAGCOR to be privatized (so do others in the Palace coterie), because he claimed the sale of 50 percent of the gambling monopoly – whose franchise runs up to June 11, 2008 (not the year 2007 as one newspaper put it) – would generate P150 billion. If Mar was quoted right, he insisted this amount paid to the government would be almost 15 times the annual PAGCOR earnings for the government of P20 billion.

By the way, didn’t Mar Roxas – along with dear Sen. Loren Legarda and former Senate President Edong Angara – endorse that Rose Baladjay Multitel "pyramid" deal which burned so many?

Roxas intoned that the proceeds from the PAGCOR sale could be applied as seed capital for an infrastructure fund, which the government could leverage kuno for highways, railways, airports, seaports and bridges.

Sounds yummy when you sugarcoat it that way. BUT think of the implications of the government’s gambling monopoly falling into the grubby and greedy hands of a gambling Mafia, or the Macau Gang (did I say Stanley Ho – no, ho? I didn’t), or the Chinese Triads? If we’re scared of the runaway proliferation of drug syndicates – including those dreaded druglords, drug-manufacturers and drug-pushers from the Chinese mainland – why aren’t we horrified at the prospect of our casinos, lottos, and our country’s gambling monopoly falling into the hands of Triads, gangsters, and "high rolling" mobsters? If we don’t want to become a narco-state (with our 1.8 million Filipino drug addicts, and counting), why do we forget that gambling syndicates usually parley their big bucks into bigger bucks by funding the lucrative drug industry, prostitution, and other "collateral" crimes? We’d become a nation in the grip of vultures and racketeers. And this gambling king/druglord empire would have limitless funds with which to bribe everybody, from politicians to policemen. What alarms many of us even more is the fact that there’s a determined, almost clandestine move in Congress – the current Twelfth Congress (as Congressman Teddy Boy Locsin himself warned in a perceptive editorial in TODAY last March 18 – to extend the PAGCOR’s franchise by 50 years! Wow!

"Until about Christmas last year," the editorial stated, "the two committees on franchises and on games of the House of Representatives were engaged in the most serious and also the most patently pointless – if not outright, larcenous – discussions on the extension of the franchise of the PAGCOR. So much so that the chairman of the House Committee on Franchises never once turned up. Rep. Miguel Zubiri said right off he would have nothing to do with it."

Since the PAGCOR franchise does not expire for five years not until the year 2008, why does the present Congress, indeed, have to strive to extend it? This task should be left not only to the next, or Thirteenth Congress, but so the further Fourteenth Congress – two elections from now. Wouldn’t that be logical? It would also be more forthright and transparent.

Why the immediate rush to extend the franchise by half a century? Sanamagan: There’s something smoking here, and I didn’t even say a "smoking gun". Obviously, the extension is being touted as a ploy to make PAGCOR more appetizing for prospective foreign investors.

I’ve got news for you: Those investors are already, Alikabok tells me, waiting behind the curtains, thrilled at the prospect of taking over control of this "crown jewel", not just a mere family jewel.

So stop! PAGCOR must never be taken from government control and slipped into "privatization" to benefit a favored few, including some with possibly unsavory backgrounds. Let’s have full disclosure of their names now – even of the names of their possible "dummies" – so they can be vetted and investigated thoroughly, and so the public will know.

Susmariosep. Saddam or his felonious and homicidal sons, Uday and Qusay (now waiting in their bunkers to reveal, perhaps, their weapons of mass destruction to the advancing Yanks and Brits) might be among the potential investors.

One thing is clear: The government itself must never relinquish PAGCOR. If jueteng is a monstrous racket, can you imagine our official casinos and other gaming outlets in the hands of monsters?

"Entertainment", my foot. Our people and our economy might be caught in the coils of a boa constrictor from whose crushing grip we may never be able to extricate ourselves.

Is this the legacy you want to leave us, GMA? Even Bong Pineda back home in Lubao might be considered, in comparison and in retrospect, as having been a peanut vendor.

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THE ROVING EYE… Defense Secretary Angelo T. Reyes rang me up last Thursday to explain that he had never called the senators "assholes". He said that there was a fictitious story going around, and he was totally misunderstood when he narrated this as a joke during a luncheon with journalists and foreign correspondents. He said that the joke went this way: "There were a group of friends having lunch and engaged in conversation. One of the fellows asserted: ‘All senators are assholes!’ At once, one man in the group stood up and furiously asserted: ‘This is an insult! I demand that you apologize and withdraw that statement!’ The fellow who had made the derogatory remark was astonished. ‘Why,’ he sputtered, ‘are you a Senator?’ To which the resentful individual replied: ‘No, I’m an asshole’!" Gee whiz, Angie. When you carelessly tell such stories, what you said will be passed from mouth to mouth, and end up relating you, and the senators, with assholes… I asked Reyes pointblank if he intended to enter politics. Did he want to run for Senator, I continued, or for President? Reyes replied that after May 2004, "I’d be perfectly content even if I ended up jobless." But he didn’t answer my question, really. He mumbled something about having no plans…er, "at this time", but neither did he want to deny anything. Does that tell you something?