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Friday, March 29, 2024

Conflicted like Mark

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Mark Villar should prove that he’s not conflicted. And no, his mother can no longer do the talking for him.

President-in-waiting Rodrigo Duterte has asked his designated public works secretary, Rep. Mark Villar of Las Piñas and Vista Land, to submit a map of the real estate development projects of his family “so people will stop talking” about the apparent conflict of interest in his appointment. Which prompts me to ask the question: Why go through all that trouble when you can find someone who isn’t conflicted to begin with?

But if Duterte wants Villar to show him a map, then that’s fine with me. I just hope the map that Villar submits will show how much land, to cite just one example, his family has bought up in the southwestern shore of the Laguna Lake, where the biggest project that the Department of Public Works and Highways is bidding out is slated to be built.

The latest news about that P123-billion project, formally called the Laguna Lakeshore Expressway Dike, is that three bidders who expressed interest in it didn’t even submit formal offers by the deadline last March 27. And one of the three groups that pre-qualified for the bidding included the Alloy Pavi Hanshin LLEDP consortium, which is comprised of Malaysia’s MTD Group, South Korea’s Hanshin and the family of former Senator Manuel Villar Jr.

The LLEDP, billed as the biggest public-private partnership (PPP) project of the outgoing Aquino administration, involves the construction of a 47-kilometer, six-lane expressway on top of a dike that stretches from Taguig to Calamba and Los Banos, Laguna, and also serves as an anti-flooding facility. The expressway will lead to the reclamation of 700 hectares of new land that will extend the current shoreline of the bay—abutting properties that Villar’s family already owns through its flagship property company, Vista Land.

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Critics of the project have denounced it for not really being a solution to flooding in Metro Manila, as President Noynoy Aquino announced in his fifth State-of-the-Nation Address. These include the small-fishermen’s group Pamalakaya and urban planner Felino Palafox Jr., who memorably compared the project to “building a toilet bowl without a flush.”

The people on the opposite shore of the lake, in Rizal province, have also complained that the project could only cause major flooding on their un-diked side, since the proposed barrier would force water levels to rise. But what seems to have really killed the project —proposed in 2012 to the Aquino administration—are questions about the profitability of the proposed tollway.

In either case, I hope Villar discloses to Duterte all of the potential conflict-of-interest situations that may arise if he accepts his appointment at DPWH. And maybe, he should start addressing complaints against his presumptive assumption himself, instead of letting his mother do it.

That’s right, if Villar is going to assume this important Cabinet portfolio, maybe he should tell his senator-mother that he can actually speak for himself. Letting her do that job only makes him look like a wuss—and an inalienable part of a family whose fortune is so dependent on government public works projects.

* * *

I wonder what got into Commission on Elections Chairman Andy Bautista yesterday, when he basically told broadcaster Ted Failon that this newspaper is engaged in biased reporting about the alleged Comelec-Smartmatic vote-rigging controversy. “You know these newspapers,” Bautista told Failon, “you have to look at the people who own them. The news that comes out in them is sometimes slanted.”

That was a really cheap shot from the Comelec chairman, the insinuation that this newspaper—which has single-handedly continued to cover the controversy—may be taking orders from its owners to publish news about what is really a legitimate issue. As a prominent legal practitioner, Bautista should know better than to use an ad hominem argument, attacking the messenger instead of responding to the message.

I think Bautista should stop worrying about who owns what newspaper and instead focus on the issues raised by Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and other people who want to get to the bottom of the alleged cheating that Comelec allowed its private Venezuela-based contractor to perpetrate. For starters, I’d really like to know from Bautista if it’s true that he has sole possession of the passwords that were allegedly given to Smartmatic’s Marlon Garcia on the night of May 9, when the supposed cheating through the changing of the transparency server’s hash codes began in earnest.

That’s what Commissioner Rowena Guanzon once alleged, anyway, that the chairman has sole possession of the passwords that somehow ended up in Garcia’s hands. Stop worrying about newspaper ownership, Mr. Chairman, and answer the questions.

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