A nightmare for City Hall coop borrowers

By Alex P. Vidal

“Especially if you’re over 40, shortening the term of your loan to pay it off sooner could make you mortgage-free in retirement.”—Barbara Corcoran

WE doubt if after submitting payment proposals to the Iloilo City Hall Ad Hoc Committee headed by Atty. Joseph Edward Areño, delinquent borrowers of the Iloilo City Government Employees Credit Cooperative (ICGECC) will be able to settle the amounts they owe the cooperative on time.

Areño has given them one-week effective August 22, 2023 to submit proposals on how to pay off the total of P18.3 million, the amount already past due as of August 3, 2023.

The total outstanding loans have reached P55.8 million, according to the investigation conducted by Areño, who is a city legal officer.

If they propose to begin paying the loans in September through salary deduction, they can never erase the loans that are past due before end of the year.

The amount involved—P18.3 million—isn’t peanuts.

In two to three years through salary deduction, there’s no way they can complete paying the P55.8 million either.

Government salaries are not as big as the salaries in private companies.

Saddled by a series of deductions like GSIS, etcetera, the meager take home pays of ordinary City Hall employees will have no room for any loan payment.

There must be another term of payment or mode of payment aside from the salary deduction that will help reduce if not totally offset the total outstanding loans.

Once a demand letter will be out, the pressure for them to settle the problem will increase and become extremely difficult.

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If Yevgeny Prigozhin were Filipino, he would be a senator if not president.

But he was Russian and in Russia, only Vladimir Putin is king.

Putschists in Russia are poisoned, tortured, banished, and killed in a plane crash.

Even in highly militarized countries in the South and Central America, Europe and Asia, coup plotters are executed in public if they failed. That’s how the ending for mutineers who can’t finish their misadventures should be expected. And the public seemed to have accepted it.

In the Philippines, coup plotters aren’t shot in public; they aren’t made to board the doomed plane. Filipino mutineers like Gringo Honasan and Antonio Trillanes IV are only made to do 100 push ups and end up as celebrities and election top notchers.

We weren’t surprised that Prigozhin, leader of the dreaded private paramilitary Wagner Group, purportedly suffered that bizarre ending.

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I watched the first GOP presidential debate August 23 night on Fox News and picked Nikki Haley, who was very articulate in defending U.S. interests, as the winner.

Others thought young billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy was the star of the show.

As a former US ambassador to the United Nation, Haley was vocal in the U.S.’s support of Israel at the Security Council, and led the withdrawal of the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Her ideas were central to the conservative philosophy but her numbers in the nomination are still below the threshold.

She decided to voluntarily step down as ambassador on December 31, 2018 and is the only lady among the Republican presidential aspirants.

Haley affirmed the United States’s willingness to use military force in response to further North Korean missile tests in the wake of the 2017–2018 North Korea crisis.

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ANOTHER BAD RECORD. The New York Yankees extended a losing streak to nine for the first time in 41 years when Tommy Kahnle allowed a go-ahead homer to CJ Abrams with two outs in the eighth inning in a 2-1 loss to the Washington Nationals on August 22 night, reported the amNewYork.

Winless since beating the Marlins on Aug. 11 in Miami, the Yankees are on their first nine-game skid since Sept. 13-21, 1982—the final month of a 79-win season when they employed three managers (Bob Lemon, Gene Michael and Clyde King). New York has been outscored 53-20 and has not held a lead since the second inning of its 11-3 loss in Atlanta on Aug. 14.

“Pretty down but we’ve got to fight through it,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “I think we’re doing and saying the right things but we’re in it to win it. At the end of the day, you work hard to put yourself in a position to shake hands at the end of the day. When you get beat over and over again and you’re in the middle of a tough season, it makes it hard.”

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two daily newspapers in Iloilo.—Ed)