Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano is in a bind. He says he wants to speed up the process of passport application and make it more efficient, but his plan is mired in a problematic deal involving the printing of travel documents.
Now, Cayetano says he has to study first whether or not the printing of passports under a 10-year deal with APO-Productivity Unit is void and illegal, as recommended by Malacañang.
“I’m not doing anything yet except getting an assessment and getting a briefing. But in the meantime we are getting a briefing how are we going to speed up the process,” Cayetano said.
“I’m taking care of the short term problem real time, the longer term problem, the [APO] contract, give us few days to be able to answer specifically,”Cayetano stressed.
Malacañang has come out with a recommendation declaring the passport printing contract as invalid and illegal after it found out that APO opened a Joint Venture Agreement with a private-owned printing press UGEC.
Cayetano admitted his concern that APO is the one supplying the machines for printing the passport.
“If we will invalidate their contract, how can we get more machines? Those are the things I have to consult with the good people of the DFA,” he said.
Cayetano said that he heard during one of the Cabinet meetings that BSP cannot accommodate the DFA immediately.
He said he wanted a few more days to determine if a bridge can be made in the meantime, and then go for the long-term printing deal.
The Philippine Association of Free Labor Union president Terry Tuazon said that the e-passport is over-priced where it should only cost P650 each.
DFA currently charges P950 apiece, plus P250 for “overtime charges” if the applicant opts to use th“Except for the electronic chip that is embedded in the e-passport that captures data and security features there are no other enhancement to justify the high cost. Digital products are getting cheaper not going expensive,“ Tuazon said.
“With 17,000 new applicants [daily] who troop to the various consular offices all over the country that’s a lot of money for the government,” Tuazon noted.
APO-Production Unit (APO-PU) and its private partner stand to rake in a P25.5 billion from the 10-year e-passport contract, far outweighing the P9 billion offer of a controversial cigarette manufacturer to settle its tax cases with the government.
In a previous Commission on Audit report, the agency found a lopsided profit-sharinf formula based on net profit after tax.
It said that UGEC, that is a mers subcontractor, is getting 90 percent of net profit, leaving a minimal 10-percent to APO-PU.
CoA also said the divided income for the first three quarters of 2015 from the joint venture could not be validated because APO-PU did not submit the pertinent documents.
Meanwhile, the APO-PU labor union headed by Conrado Molina sued Coloma et al for plunder and graft arising from alleged questionable payment of some P200 million in commissions to 11 “sales specialists” from 2011 to 2015.
Cited as co-respondents were Alora, Armando Dimacurot Jr., Jaime Aldaba, Olivia Marcelo, Gerardo Sevilla, Dominic Tajon, and 11 others identified only as John Does.
Coloma dismissed the charges as “false and baseless.” According to the CoA, APO-PU paid P70.1 million in “excessive commissions” to the so-called sales specialists in 2015 alone. These unnecessary expenses could have been avoided by hiring a permanent technical staff to handle sales and marketing, the CoA said.
Sales specialists, indeed, are extraneous because APO-PU “is already assured of a captured market.”
And why is APO-PU, a government-owned corporation, paying membership dues to the SSS which is exclusively for private sector workers? That really baffles the imagination, COA said.