Feuding tycoons stunt Philippine infrastructure
MANILA: While Philippine tycoons argue over a typing error in a highway bid and whose shopping mall benefits the most from a train station, commuters are paying the price.
A 47-km expressway connecting Manila to the southern provinces has been delayed by a San Miguel Corp. appeal to President Benigno Aquino after its bid was rejected on a technicality.
Meanwhile, SM Prime Holdings, the group of billionaire Henry Sy, and Ayala Land are fighting over where to build a train station, both seeking to place it closer to their respective malls 600 meters from each other.
Caught in the middle are 22.7 million people who live and work in metro Manila, where inadequate infrastructure and recurring flooding produce gridlock and stunt the economy.
The project delays threaten Aquino's plan to lure $11.6 billion of investment in roads, railways and airports to spur growth to as much as 8.5 percent by the time he leaves office in 2016.
"It is frustrating how delays in major infrastructure arise from conflicts between those who wield economic or legal power," commuter Aneka Rodriguez, 31, said.
A court injunction on the train station means further delays to projects that may cut her daily commute by five hours, she said.
The Philippine economy is dominated by business groups run by a handful of politically connected families.
The Zobel family owns half of 180-year-old Ayala Corp., which transformed a former airstrip in Makati City into the nation's Wall Street and has a market value of $9 billion. The Zobels supported Corazon Aquino, the former president and Benigno's mother.
Sy, 90, is the nation's richest man with a net worth of $11.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He built his empire from a shoe business and now owns the nation's biggest bank and mall operator. SM Prime has also locked horns with Ayala Land over reclamation projects in Manila Bay.
San Miguel, the nation's biggest company and maker of the 116-year-old beer brand, is run by Ramon Ang and its chairman, Eduardo Cojuangco, is an uncle of the nation's president.
The key to cutting Rodriguez's commute is the planned station where Light Rail Transit 1, Metro Rail Transit 3 and Metro Rail Transit 7 intersect, which is in limbo as SM Prime and Ayala fight over the location.
The argument stems from a contract SM Prime signed in 2009 putting the station in front of its mall, while an Ayala-led venture won a government contract to extend LRT-1 last month that effectively allowed it to build the station near its own mall. San Miguel, which is building MRT-7, supports SM Prime.
The delays frustrate about 1.1 million commuters who use LRT-1 and MRT-3 daily. The MRT-7 line, first proposed in 2002, has an estimated capacity of 450,000 travelers.