The controversy over the two broadband projects costing US$789 million Gloria entered into with the Chinese has all markings of corruption written all over it. When she visited China, she promptly entered into an executive agreement that gave the Chinese Telecom firm ZTE Corporation the rights to undertake the projects, defying our own existing laws on transparency and accountability. Public bidding be damned. Not surprisingly, Gloria's lackey at the Justice Department, Gonzales, claims that the deal is above board since the projects were part of an executive agreement.
And this is where it really gets suspicious: in the age of photocopying machines, hard drives and the internet, copies of the contract were reportedly lost in a hotel room of the Philippine delegation. Maybe the term "soft copy" hasn't entered their vocabulary just yet.
So how can Gonzales claim to defend the agreement as legal when he presumably hasn't seen the contract yet?
Two UP Economics professors (current and former deans) slammed the project, arguing that the haphazard manner by which the contracts were entered into, without the benefit of any careful feasibility study, and the obvious fact that two existing broadband backbones (of PLDT and its competitors) render the projects redundant and outside the core competency of the government, will likely end up as another White Elephant, very much like the useless NAIA-3 and the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, all blatant examples of government corruption on a large-scale basis. Gloria wants to hook up all government offices as well as the little sitios and barrios in remote areas to the Information Age, when basic infrastructure such as power supply and my gulay! good roads are not even in place yet.
The details of the contracts remain hazy, but what is clear is that the Chinese government will offer the loans to finance the projects.
So here's the catch: Beijing gets to call the shots, the Chinese company earns from the onerous deal, government officials get kickbacks-- all for projects that are doomed from the very start.
And we're the milking cows.
And this is where it really gets suspicious: in the age of photocopying machines, hard drives and the internet, copies of the contract were reportedly lost in a hotel room of the Philippine delegation. Maybe the term "soft copy" hasn't entered their vocabulary just yet.
So how can Gonzales claim to defend the agreement as legal when he presumably hasn't seen the contract yet?
Two UP Economics professors (current and former deans) slammed the project, arguing that the haphazard manner by which the contracts were entered into, without the benefit of any careful feasibility study, and the obvious fact that two existing broadband backbones (of PLDT and its competitors) render the projects redundant and outside the core competency of the government, will likely end up as another White Elephant, very much like the useless NAIA-3 and the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, all blatant examples of government corruption on a large-scale basis. Gloria wants to hook up all government offices as well as the little sitios and barrios in remote areas to the Information Age, when basic infrastructure such as power supply and my gulay! good roads are not even in place yet.
The details of the contracts remain hazy, but what is clear is that the Chinese government will offer the loans to finance the projects.
So here's the catch: Beijing gets to call the shots, the Chinese company earns from the onerous deal, government officials get kickbacks-- all for projects that are doomed from the very start.
And we're the milking cows.
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