EDITORIAL - Pre-departure inspection

By next month, the Philippine Coast Guard will begin subjecting yachts and other “non-common carriers” to pre-departure inspection. This is according to the PCG commandant, Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan, when asked yesterday if the PCG conducts PDI on yachts.

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III posed the question to Gavan during the deliberations of the Senate subcommittee on finance on the 2025 budget proposed by the Department of Transportation. Unlike the China Coast Guard, which is under China’s military commission, the PCG is a civilian agency under the DOTr.

Pimentel raised the question not because of Chinese incursions into Philippine waters, but because dismissed Bamban mayor Alice Guo had told another Senate committee last Monday that she and her alleged siblings Shiela and Wesley fled the country last July on a yacht that they boarded at a port in Manila.

Thanks to Guo’s revelation, which senators are still trying to verify, the nation has belatedly learned that yachts are not subjected to any inspection prior to leaving any port in the country. No law prohibits government agencies from conducting such inspections. Unfortunately, no agency found it necessary to conduct such checks.

Apart from the lack of pre-departure inspection, it looks like there is also little or no inspection of non-common carriers as they enter the country. This can be surmised from the numerous reports over the years of illegal items including drugs, guns, agricultural commodities and even motorcycles in commercial quantities being smuggled into the country using “non-common carriers” such as yachts.

Gavan told the Senate yesterday that the PCG would amend a circular to include non-common carriers among the seacraft that would be subjected to pre-departure inspection. Pimentel asked, but only rhetorically, why the PCG did not consider doing this when nothing prevented the agency from doing so. Gavan might have replied that this was because of the lack of resources and manpower to carry out the PDIs all over the country.

The PCG lacks vessels and manpower even to sufficiently patrol the West Philippine Sea. If the government wants to boost the PCG’s capability to inspect more seagoing craft, it should provide the required funding, logistics and resources. Otherwise, there will be many more fugitives who will leave the country as easily as Alice Guo.