Iloilo airport mess ignored by Drilon

Sen. Franklin Drilon, in flaying China’s loan to Northrail, waves a supposedly superior dole from Japan to a new airport in his Iloilo province. That P7.4-billion deal, at 0.95 percent interest for 40 years against China’s 3 percent for 25 years on P20 billion, does look finer at first glance. But on close scrutiny, it fails the very standards by which Drilon measures the train project.

Northrail meekly accepted China’s appointed builder, Drilon rants, whereas Japan deferred to public bidding. Too, Chinese courts may take jurisdiction over contract disputes, but Japan settles rows on Filipino soil.

It sure does. On record in "biddings" to construct the Iloilo airport is how Japan imposed a favored Japanese consortium right on RP territory. Three of 29 prospectors had qualified to bid, one of them Taisei-Shimizu-Kajima (TSK) Group. Two weeks before bidding day, Mar. 28, 2003, Kajima wrote the Dept. of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) that it was withdrawing. Japanese authorities not only had suspended Kajima from civil works nine months prior, but also convicted it that day for bribing a parliament minister. Taisei-Shimizu at first informed DOTC they would submit new qualifying papers as a duo, sans Kajima. No problem, DOTC said, although reports were filtering in from the Japanese press that Taisei and Shimizu had also been indicted. On Mar. 26 Taisei-Shimizu changed their mind, saying they would still bid as TSK trio after all. No way, DOTC replied. The group ignored the Filipino officials and submitted a bid. DOTC promptly disqualified it.

What followed is something Drilon must know. He not only sits in DOTC’s Iloilo airport committee, but also brags to have worked on the Japanese loan since 2000. Japan’s Bank for International Cooperation and embassy officers fired angry notes to DOTC against TSK’s disqualification. Kajima was suspended in Japan, not overseas, they insisted. DOTC stood its ground. JBIC threatened to scrap the loan. Fine with us, DOTC snorted. Five months later DOTC suddenly melted and called for a new bidding. TSK won, although its bid was 5.84 percent (P432 million) over the ceiling set by no less than Japan’s feasibility studies.

Sanlakas party-list Rep. JV Bautista had denounced DOTC’s waffling in a privilege speech on Aug. 25, 2003, the day of the second bidding. It was as if he had anticipated the award to TSK. Months before on Jan. 28, then-Iloilo Rep. Augusto Syjuco also had stood up against the project. There appeared to be overpricing in acquiring 186 hectares of airport land in ten barangays in the towns of Sta. Barbara and Cabatuan. Property officials had assessed the value at P20 per square meter; the owners had demanded P40; but the provincial capitol bought it at P65, for a total of P120 million.

The additional price could perhaps be justified as "disturbance fee" for owners and residents of the soon-to-be airport site. But there was more, as exposed by Provincial Board Member Emmanuel Gallar at the capitol and Partido Manggagawa Rep. Renato Magtubo in Congress in Dec. 2004. The few dozen hectares of resettlement for the dislocated folk was a dried-up riverbed, worth no more than P12 per square meter by land assessors’ estimates. Long-time claimants asked for P30. Again the provincial capitol overpaid at P100.

And since the relocation site was sunken and prone to flooding, the capitol paid another P100 per cubic meter to fill it up. Of course, it needed soil from somewhere as landfill. Conveniently, the capitol identified the hills near the proposed airport for quarrying. Families close to Iloilo Gov. Neil Tupaz own the lots, the congressmen averred. For free, they would have the hills leveled, so they could erect extra floors on business structures beside the airport, yet still meet international aviation height limits.

The House committee on transportation at first investigated the TSK bidding irregularity. The good-government committee took over to look into the implementation anomalies as well. In the hearings four of five Iloilo congressmen took turns to expose still more scams. Tupaz had awarded the multimillion-peso quarrying works to three companies with a common address, lawyer and accountant. One was in the name of a friend who had never before engaged in construction. Another turned out to be a front for the governor’s in-laws; the third, for his son. All had no clearance from the environment office to alter Iloilo’s landscape.

In all, Justice Sec. and Iloilo ex-congressman Raul Gonzalez fumes, the bidding and implementation misdeeds could total P2 billion. But will he prosecute, considering that the Iloilo airport is a showcase of the Arroyo administration from which Drilon broke only last July 8?

As the question hangs, critics wonder why TSK’s contract award was rushed so close to the 2004 election, and the works began in the middle of the campaign – despite a ban on such by the Election Code. Drilon chooses to defend the airport project and the contracts of Liberal party mate Tupaz, but gripes against Northrail, which perceived political rival Speaker Joe de Venecia negotiated with China.

Perhaps this is another case of politics getting in the way of progress. All the complainers – Syjuco, Bautista, Magtubo, Gallar, and four incumbent Iloilo legislators –are, after all, politicians. But the dislocated folk who had barricaded the roads to the airport site in Dec. 2003 are not politicos. They were not against progress either. All they wanted was swift resettlement as promised, ahead of capitol wards who were given lots as well. Ilonggos scrutinizing the multimillion-peso subcontracts are not politicos. They welcome a new airport of international standards, but not the potentially higher airport fees to cover the many reported overprices and kickbacks.

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