Busted

The public hearing of the Senate committee on agriculture and food into the rampant cases of smuggling of imported rice into the country opened a can of worms. From my own appreciation and understanding of the televised Senate hearing, the problem is not just smuggling per se. As bared by the Senate inquiry last Wednesday, there is a new form of scam that has been capitalizing on poor cooperatives of rice farmers.

Senator Cynthia Villar, who presided the Senate public hearing, caught by his own mouth the “big fish” in this latest scam, Chinoy trader David Bangayan, aka “David Tan.” Sen. Villar teamed up with Department of Justice (DOJ) Secretary Leila de Lima who earlier fished out the businessman as the alleged David Tan behind the many big-time rice smuggling incidents interdicted at the Bureau of Customs.

After he appeared and testified before Sen. Villar’s Senate committee, perhaps Bangayan still did not know what hit him.

At the end of the Senate hearing, Villar declared she is no longer interested in looking further into the reports that David Tan could be more than just one person. As far as the Senate inquiry into the pernicious rice smuggling cases is concerned, Villar is satisfied having established what she wanted to find out: Bangayan is an importer of rice engaged in some nefarious trading scheme taking advantage of the loopholes of existing laws. He got away with it until he was finally caught by his own admission at the Senate.

I have never seen Villar in action during congressional hearings while she was still the congresswoman from Las Piñas for three consecutive terms. This was the first time I saw her conduct a public hearing now as one of the neophyte senators in the 16th Congress.

She is the wife of former Senator Manny Villar who ran as Nacionalista Party (NP) presidential standard-bearer but lost to President Benigno “Noy” Aquino III during the May 2010 elections. People who know the couple quite well credit Mrs. Villar as the real brains that run their successful real estate business. A graduate of business administration from the University of the Philippines, Mrs. Villar is known in the industry as an astute businesswoman.

But now that her husband has gone back to the private sector, ex-Sen.Villar now heads their family-owned Vista Land Group of Companies that developed and built the various Camella Homes housing villages catering to middle income families all over the country.

Mrs. Villar may not be as flashy about her wit and knowledge of the laws as her fellow woman Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago. She could be, however, just as feisty. This we saw during the almost four-hour public hearing that was aired live from the Senate session hall the other day.

During the Senate hearing, Sen. Villar even cut down to size her fellow NP Alan Peter Cayetano who is the Senate majority leader. When Cayetano tried to ask again Bangayan if he is really into rice importations, Villar cut in: “He (Bangayan) already admitted it!”

As chairperson of the Senate committee on agriculture and food, Sen. Villar invited Bangayan along with several rice traders and farmers cooperatives to this Senate public hearing. This was after the inter-agency team led by the DOJ and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) unmasked Bangayan as one of the biggest rice smugglers now in the country.

 Based on official records in the hands of the DOJ-NBI, David Tan and Bangayan are one and the same person. When the NBI caught him last week, Bangayan repeatedly denied he is the alleged David Tan being accused of rice smuggling. Apparently, Bangayan is so confident with his legal defense and sworn innocence of the rice smuggling charges, he accepted the Senate committee invitation.

Confronted by Sen.Villar with official documents that her committee had gathered, Bangayan confirmed his main businesses actually were scrap metal and that he later ventured into rice trading.

Sen. Villar’s methodical manner of eliciting information during the Senate hearing got the trader into casually confessing how he made money with his business of buying and selling imported rice. Under oath before the Senate hearing, Bangayan admitted he started in the rice trade sometime in 2012 and that he used farmers’ cooperatives to secure legally his import permits for rice under the minimum access volume (MAV).

Villar was able to cut to the chase and expose Bangayan’s attempts to lie under oath during his testimony. With her subtle but sharp questions, Villar got Bangayan to say he was trading using this scheme because it was what he says as “kalakaran” in the imported rice business in the country.

As for how they trade, Bangayan argued there was nothing illegal about it, citing they enter into a joint venture agreement with rice farmers’ cooperatives like many other traders do.

Of course, while it may be a legitimate arrangement, this is illegal and prejudicial to the interests of the rice farmers who are supposed to benefit from this state-granted privilege to import rice under MAV to protect the country’s agriculture sector while in transition to free trade regime.

The government adopted the MAV after the Philippine Senate ratified in December 1994 the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade-World Trade Organization (GATT-WTO). This made the Philippines one of the signatory-countries of the WTO that ushered in the global borderless trading regime.

The MAV protects Filipino rice farmers from the impact of state subsidies enjoyed by their counterpart farmers from fellow WTO member-countries. But apparently, enterprising traders found a way to reap its benefits at the expense of poor cooperatives of rice farmers.

Invited by Sen.Villar to the Senate hearing, leaders of these rice farmers cooperatives testified how they became unwitting victims of this trade scheme that left them virtually with empty sacks of rice.

Now that these scheming rice traders got busted, more ingenious ways would surely be invented to go around the rules of the game. The only way to win the battle against these criminal minds is to craft laws that could outsmart them.