The end of the road for Roxas and Abaya?
IT seems ridiculous now, but not too long ago, Liberal Party stalwarts Mar Roxas and Jun Abaya were both seen as presidential material. As they now face the prospect of going to jail for a long time, amid the plunder charges against them, one is reminded that pedigree can only bring you so far. You have to put in the real work at the job the people gave you.
This week, Roxas, Abaya, and other former officials of the Aquino administration were charged with plunder for their reported involvement in the anomalous multi-billion-peso maintenance contract for Metro Manila’s main urban railway line, MRT3. The Department of Transportation filed the plunder complaint at the Ombudsman, adding to its earlier charges of multiple counts of graft.
The two former stars of the LP were named by the DOTr as the “main conspirators” of an alleged scheme to amass ill-gotten wealth, ostensibly in connivance with maintenance contractor Busan Universal Rail, but also with the incompetent PH Trams, formed on the fly reportedly by LP operators and supporters.
Swirling around Roxas, Abaya, and company are allegations of irregularities in the purchase of 13.77 billion worth of light rail vehicles that proved incompatible and unusable, and reported kickbacks in the 154million monthly payments to Busan “despite unperformed service and undelivered spare parts” as cited in the complaint.
Both Roxas and Abaya deny the allegations against them. What cannot be denied is the fizzled-out political careers of both these men, who, despite their highly touted Ivy League education, managed to mess up a simple maintenance contract.
Just goes to show love of country is more important than where you went to school (Roxas went to University of Pennsylvania, Abaya the US Naval Academy), or who your rich and famous relatives are (Roxas belongs to the landed Araneta family; Abaya is the great grandson of the Philippines’ first president Emilio Aguinaldo).
Either through sheer incompetence or “fund-raising” as the government complaint alleges, Roxas and Abaya managed to make travelling via the MRT3 a hell for millions of Filipino commuters. These are the citizens that pay taxes and the salaries of public officials, but now have to deal with the constant breakdowns and risks to their lives and actual limbs (one commuter lost her right arm in an MRT3 accident on November 14).
Recently, too, a coach of the MRT3 detached from the train that was pulling it and stranded over 100 passengers behind it. This decoupling was considered “baffling” as transport officials insist the train should have shut down when the system noted the communications error. The government is looking at possible sabotage by its political enemies.
Public anger has long been simmering over what has happened to the MRT3, which was running well under the maintenance of Sumitomo Corp. There has been no sufficient explanation, at least not a logical one, from Roxas and Abaya as to why they would allow the deterioration of services for the country’s busiest railway line, which at its peak carried half a million passengers per day.
Instead of extending Sumitomo’s contract when it was due to end October 19, 2012, the DOTC under Roxas and later Abaya, gave the maintenance contract to PH Trams-CB&T, which lacked the qualifications to perform the job but were owned by allies of the Liberal Party, according to former MRT3 general manager Al Vitangcol. In an affidavit, Vitangcol said the DOTC extended the contract with PH Trams twice, costing the government 1535 million.
The DOTr had described PH Trams as the “dummy entity for the respondents belonging to the Liberal Party.” One of the names connected with PH Trams (and also the other provider, Global-APT) was one Marlo de la Cruz, who was allegedly the political operator and fundraiser of Roxas, who ran for the presidency in 2016.
Busan was the new maintenance contractor after PH Trams and it bagged a 14.25-billion contract with DOTC under Abaya, whom the government claimed had hatched a “contrived emergency” so it could forgo public bidding and get Busan as the new contractor in a deal it said was “littered with irregularities.”
Getting unqualified maintenance providers was part of the big conspiracy to raise funds for the LP, according to the DoTr complaint. “They set into motion a grand scheme of turning the DOTC as a bottomless cash cow, entering into one anomalous procurement project after the other, in order to amass, accumulate, and acquire illgotten wealth,” the complaint said.
What a mess, but the country needs this clean-up of the bureacracy and its political players if it is to move forward. There must be clear accountability, the people demand it, and if that means jailing political royalty then so be it.