EDITORIAL - Buried in debt

Remember the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant? You should, since even your great-grandchildren are likely to repay debts incurred by the government to build that power plant in Morong, Bataan. The Constitution provides that the biggest allocation in the national budget should go to education, but in actual terms, the biggest chunk is in fact eaten up by debt repayments. That debt puts a heavy drag on the peso and shrinks your purchasing power. And the biggest single debt was incurred for the construction of the power plant, which took eight years to build at a cost of $2.3 billion.

Twenty years after construction ended, Filipino taxpayers continue to pay a whopping $155,000 a day – about P8.7 million at current rates – to repay the money borrowed for a power plant that never produced a single watt of electricity. The nation still owes $80.4 million – about P4.5 billion – for the plant. By the most optimistic estimates, taxpayers will finish repaying this debt by 2010, 34 years after construction started on a plant that was later mothballed due to safety concerns.

Worse, no one has been punished for a project that critics say was grossly overpriced and did not take into account the proximity of the site to an earthquake fault and Mt. Pinatubo. Businessman Herminio Disini, who is related by affinity to former first lady Imelda Marcos, stands accused of brokering the deal with a promise of an $18-million commission to the president at the time, Ferdinand Marcos. Disini was charged with graft for allegedly "requesting and receiving" $17 million from Westinghouse Electric Corp. and $1 million from Burns and Roe for the construction of the plant.

Aniano Desierto, when he was the Ombudsman, dismissed the graft charges against Disini three times. But the Presidential Commission on Good Government brought the case to the Supreme Court, which gave the PCGG a favorable ruling in February last year. It took 16 more months before the government made its next major move. The other day government prosecutors revived the graft case against Disini. If the nation gets lucky, this case may be resolved with finality by 2010, by which time the debt on the power plant would have been paid and Disini would have fully enjoyed the fruits of his labors. In this country, high crime pays.