PECO’s ‘help’ insincere

By Herbert Vego

 

WHY is the defunct Panay Electric Co. (PECO) so anxious to demolish the credibility of the incumbent power distributor in Iloilo City, MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power), attributing brownouts to “inexperience” and “inefficiency”?

A PECO official was certainly sarcastic and insincere when he said in a radio interview that he could send an engineer to help MORE Power trouble-shoot “faults” that could have caused unscheduled brownouts. All that MORE had to do was ask for it.

But since PECO’s technical men are the same ones now employed with MORE, there is no point in believing that offer.

MORE Power has merely taken over the bulok or dilapidated distribution utility from PECO by virtue of the expropriation process provided by the law (RA 11212) signed by President Rodrigo Duterte on February 14, 2019.

MORE Power’s President Roel Z. Castro has vowed to modernize the utility within three years – necessitating importation of new equipment — through an infusion of P1.8  billion in added capital expenditure.

Meanwhile, why would PECO come to the rescue when it has always been obsessed with regaining the legislative franchise it lost to MORE Power?

The rumor that someone was “sabotaging” its successor’s operation should not be taken lightly.  No less than Mayor Jerry P. Treñas has advised MORE Power to ask the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to probe that sabotage angle.

Atty. Romel Duron, the councilor who chairs the committee on transportation and communication, would rather have the probe initiated by the  Sangguniang Panglunsod.

“We city residents stand to suffer if brownouts persist,” he told this writer yesterday. “That is why I am calling for a hearing with MORE Power officials on Tuesday.”

He said the city has the means to catch saboteurs if there really are.  Each barangay has five or more peacekeepers or barangay tanods who could do the job while prowling the streets.

Was PECO the “agitator” behind two non-Ilonggo party-list congressmen — Abang Lingkod’s Stephen Paduano and Ako Bisaya’s Sonny Lagon — who vowed to initiate a congressional investigation on the “inefficiency” of the new distribution utility?

A congressional probe, alas, would not bring back PECO as a “better” franchisee.  It would, on the contrary, bring back to mind those days when the House committee on legislative franchises flatly rejected PECO’s application for franchise renewal due to mounting public complaints about frequent brownouts, poor customer service, overcharging and fire-prone leaning poles, among others.

Having already lost its technical personnel to MORE Power, PECO would be more interested in a “just compensation” that is much more than the P482 million specified by RA 11212 and which MORE Power is willing to pay.

But that is easier said than  done, the escrowed amount being based on PECO’s own tax declaration, subject to final approval by a court of law.

Once again I remember a column written by Sunstar columnist Neil Honeyman on November 14, 2018, alleging that Don Enrique Razon had offered to buy PECO for P6 billion, only to be turned down because PECO wanted much more.

I remember Claire dela Fuente’s song, Sayang.

 

-oOo-

 

EIGHTY-SEVEN percent of India’s population is allegedly supportive of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to boycott made-in-China products. India imports $70 billion worth of Chinese products annually.

Modi believes that destabilization of China’s economy could stall its world-domination ambition.

This comes after 20 Indian guards died in a skirmish with their Chinese counterparts manning the disputed China-India border at Galwan river valley on Tuesday. No casualty on the part of the Chinese has been confirmed.

The fatalities are the first in four decades of both nations’ conflict along the 3,488km undemarcated border.

Internet photographs show protesters at Noida, India burning photos of China’s president Xi Jinping and Chinese flags.

We have heard of similar boycott calls made by Filipino individuals and consumer groups irked by China’s occupation of disputed islands at the West Philippine Sea.

Some of us have stopped buying canned meat from China after reading about rat or bat meat being passed off as beef.

While we don’t expect President Duterte to do a Modi, a more massive boycott movement could convince the Chinese that most of us don’t want to be a province of China.

China is claiming territories as far as 1,000 kilometers from the closest Chinese soil, including ours at the Spratly islands and Scarborough shoal.