Dummies demonizing Cha-cha – Antonino

Rep. Rodolfo Antonino accuses local dummies of foreign firms of demonizing Charter change. With a slush fund of P15 million, he says, the dummies are using STOP Cha-cha, which opposes the manner but not the need for constitutional reforms, to promote surreptitious ends. They have given P5 million to an ad agency to place wayward materials like imagined transitory provisions that would make Gloria Arroyo and Noli de Castro rule for life.

To create jobs and thus wipe out poverty, Charter reforms would delete provisions hostile to foreign investors. If this happens, Antonino says, lucrative but illegal dummying for foreigners would end. While he did not name the dummies, he referred to "a lawyer-officer of the Makati Business Club who is linked to a failed airport project."

Only one MBC officer is a lawyer – its chairman Ricardo Romulo. And his law firm, Romulo Mabanta Buenaventura Sayoc delos Angeles (RMBSA), is the counsel of Piatco and Fraport AG of Germany. Piatco-Fraport stole the contract for NAIA-3, erected a shoddy terminal whose ceiling caved in even before inaugural, and bribed three administrations to wangle favorable terms – all reasons for voiding by the Supreme Court. Romulo also was associated with a Swiss pharmaceutical group that locally makes and imports drugs, and packages and warehouses brands for other firms. The conglomerate is one of the reasons for high prices of medicines. Could Antonino be referring to Romulo?

Lawyering for Piatco-Fraport got Romulo’s RMBSA into trouble last month. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption raided the offices of its affiliate, RMBSA Corporate Services Ltd., reportedly in search of evidence of money laundering. The raid came in the wake of news bits that RMBSA Nominees Ltd. set up in early 2001 two companies in the British Virgin Islands, which Piatco-Fraport bagman Alfonso Liongson used for bribery.

Liongson allegedly moved about $6.3 million from personal accounts in Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corp. in Manila and the financial island. The money went to Jetstream Ltd. (HSBC Account 485-6-605763) and Mainland Global Ltd. (HSBC Account 485-5-605764), both of which he also controlled. The transfers coincided with the signing by officials of onerous revisions to the Piatco-Fraport contract. One such alteration allowed Piatco-Fraport to raise passenger terminal fees once NAIA-3 is operational. Another granted it instant franchise, without bidding, over such public utilities as airport parking, duty-free shops, and all signage. Still another exempted Piatco-Fraport from constructing an $18-million tunnel linking NAIA-3 to -1 and -2, but just pave a surface road for $1.1 million in spite of danger to tarmac traffic. One more revision then exempted it from erecting an P880-million Tramo interchange, but transferred the job to the government. Another allowed Piatco-Fraport to build a duty-free mall whose height defied aviation safety limits, and whose open-to-the-public policy would have messed up security. On July 13, 2004, RMBSA’s Atty. Joseph Anthony M. Alejandro dissolved Jetstream and Mainland Global.

These reports notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine that Romulo is the MBC lawyer-officer Antonino is referring to. For, Romulo often speaks about good corporate morals. He is chair of both the Bishop-Businessmen’s Conference and St. Scholastica’s College. About Charter change, Romulo in 1999 was with the Preparatory Commission on Constitutional Review. The PCCR came out strongly recommending the deletion of provisions hostile to foreign investors, also to lick poverty as today’s constitutional reformists advocate.

Then again, Romulo claimed last month that Charter change would harm the economy. Hmm...

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An unfunny thing happened on the way to the Equitable-PCI Bank annual stockholders meeting. On its eve Monday the Sandiganbayan barred EPCIB vice chair Martin Romualdez from voting the sequestered shares of his cousin, Rep. Imee Romualdez Marcos, under Trans-Middle East Equity (TMEE). The court ban was but a reiteration of a 1995 Supreme Court edict. Still it goes beyond preventing Romualdez from seizing more board seats. It also effectively opens the door for the Presidential Commission on Good Government to investigate his withdrawal last Oct., as short-stint chair, of P138 million from the bank coffers.

Newsbreak magazine broke the story last month from an internal bank memo. It said Romualdez withdrew the cash representing TMEE dividends and profit share from EPCIB in 1991-1995. This, despite a standing order by the Sandiganbayan to hold in escrow all TMEE shares pending verification of ill-gotten sourcing. EPCIB corporate secretary Pelagio Ricalde allegedly allowed the huge takeout on a personal interpretation that in escrow are only the shares and not the cash earnings.

The PCGG would not have learned about the withdrawal if not for the Newsbreak report. In a follow-up, the magazine reported that PCGG commissioner William Dichoso will look into how the money was taken and why the agency was never informed.

A lead to sniff is if the anti-graft court allowed the takeout at all. Too, if PCGG lawyers are on the ball about sequestration cases. Unfunny things can happen on the way to the court as well. As for the PCGG, only after the Newsbreak story did it dig up from the files the old Supreme Court ruling in its favor.

The family of Kokoy Romualdez (Martin’s dad and Imelda Marcos’s brod) controls TMEE. Through it the Romualdezes once owned the biggest block of Philippine Commercial Industrial Bank (PCIB). During Ferdinand Marcos’s martial rule, Kokoy supposedly pressured the Lopez clan to give up majority hold of PCIB in his favor. Equitable Bank later acquired PCIB.

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