Murphy’s deal
With the ZTE deal, everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. Is it any wonder, if the lurid reports ultimately prove accurate, that a Commission on Elections (Comelec) official was actually involved in the deal?The Comelec should have nothing to do with the ambitious but fatally flawed plan to construct a National Broadband Network -- unless, that is, previous participation in another ambitious but fatally flawed computerization contract (think Mega Pacific) was a prerequisite. But, if the reports are accurate, the hiring of the election official to lobby for the contract was a masterstroke of cynicism: during an election period, the influence of election commissioners is second to none.
As it is, the entire NBN scandal has all the hallmarks of a Comelec project under the chairmanship of Benjamin Abalos.
Like the infamous claim of Maguindanao election supervisor Lintang Bedol, the scandal involves stolen documents. To be sure, the ZTE deal wasn’t the only such contract stolen in Boao, China, last April, hours after it was signed in the presence of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. At least five other contracts were filched, too. But like Bedol, officials of the Department of Transportation and Communication waited an inordinately long time to report the alleged theft.
The scandal also features clueless government officials, in the mold of Abalos himself. The President’s chief lawyer, Sergio Apostol, announced that there was, in fact, no contract. Transportation and Communication Secretary Leandro Mendoza, whose department will manage the network, kept a studied if embarrassed silence. And the Department of Justice ruled that the contract between ZTE and the Philippine government was valid -- without, however, actually seeing a copy of the contract.
Like the Maguindanao vote recount, the scandal is marked by a thorough lack of transparency. The contract for the network mysteriously ballooned in the course of a few months, ending as a $330-million project. In the process, the competitive and in fact superior bids of two other companies were virtually ignored.
Above all, and like Abalos’ oft-repeated claims of his commitment to clean and honest elections, the scandal involves a betrayal of the project’s very objective. Instead of an infusion of foreign capital to produce a functioning network, we will get the opposite: an unnecessary and expensive piece of government infrastructure, paid for by Filipino taxpayers.
Last March, officials of ZTE, described in news releases then as China’s largest listed telecommunications equipment provider, pledged (together with officials of another Chinese company) to invest heavily in the Philippines. “Officials of Pioneer Metals Group of Companies based in China and Hong Kong and ZTE Corp. ... told President Macapagal-Arroyo in separate calls in Malacañang of their intentions to invest here….”
This notion of investment, however, has been stood on its head. A few days ago, the Philippine government took out a loan from China’s Import-Export Bank, including a $400-million allocation for the National Broadband Network. What does this mean? It means ZTE is not in fact investing in the Philippines; it has bamboozled the Philippine government into taking out a loan from the Chinese government to fund ZTE’s “investment.”
Surely this “investment” is not what the President and her economic officials had in mind, when they discussed the need for a “privately funded government broadband network” in November 2006, and resolved that “the government connectivity and infrastructure should be developed at no cost, and with savings, to the national government.”
For these or similar reasons, Rep. Carlos Padilla of Nueva Vizcaya has filed graft charges against Mendoza, two of his assistant secretaries, and at least four officials of ZTE, for violating anti-graft and government procurement laws. “The officials I have charged are liable for misleading the public and executing this anomalous contract and should be punished accordingly,” Padilla said.
Let’s hope Murphy’s Law, at work in this controversial deal at every stage, does not extend to the prosecution of Padilla’s case.
