"Were the concerned regulatory agencies sleeping on the job?"
"Were the concerned regulatory agencies sleeping on the job?"
After reading the quo warranto petition filed in February by the Solicitor General against ABS-CBN and listening to the statement made by party-list Rep. Rodante Marcoleta at the start of last month’s House of Representatives hearing on the radio-TV network’s application for a replacement for its expired franchise, most Filipinos will doubtless be re-examining their understanding of the phrase ‘government regulation.’ ABS-CBN’s 25-year franchise expired on May 4, 2020.
Up until the filing of the quo warranto, petition most Filipinos had the impression that government regulation was a 24/365 thing and that the government’s regulatory personnel were monitoring business enterprises – especially public utilities – on a continuing, day-by-day basis. But they almost certainly no longer have that impression after the quo warranto petition and Rep. Marcoleta’s anti-ABS-CBN brief; government regulation must now seem, to them, an eve-of-franchise-expiry activity. They cannot be faulted for thinking so.
Consider, first, the Solicitor General’s quo warranto pleading. There Mr. Jose Calida threw everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at this country’s largest broadcast network.
Allegations of violation of all the laws that a business enterprise can possibly violate – laws governing nationality, citizenship, labor, taxation among them – abound in Mr. Calida’s petition. You name it, ABS-CBN did it, alleged the Solicitor General.
Now consider the statement – diatribe is probably a more accurate characterization – of Rep. Marcoleta on the subject of ABS-CBN’s new-franchise application. Appearing to read from a script prepared for him, the party-list legislator rattled off so many regulatory violations that his audience must have been left wondering whether ABS-CBN has been operating like a corporate Mafioso all these years. If the alleged violations have been there all along – and either are of public record or are easily verifiable – why are they being cited only now, sensible Filipinos want to know.
Take, for instance, the matter of PDR (Philippine Depositary Receipts) that have been issued to and are being held by, US investors in ABS-CBN. The Solicitor General and Rep. Marcoleta claim that PDRs are being employed by ABS-CBN to circumvent the 1987 Constitution’s 40 percent limit on foreign ownership of Philippine corporations. In their presentations the two officials – Mr. Marcoleta is a Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives – neglected to mention three facts. One is that the use of PDRs is not limited to ABS-CBN; a number of other major utilities, including GMA Network and Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) have PDRs in their financial structure. The second fact is that the regulator of corporations, SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) has been aware of ABS-CBN’s PDRs and has not declared them violative of the Constitution. The third fact, which any corporate lawyer knows, is that owners of PDRs do not have the right to vote whereas owners of ABS-CBN common shares do.
And then there is the allegation about the citizenship of ABS-CBN’s chairman emeritus, Eugenio Lopez III. Mr. Lopez was at the helm of ABS-CBN for a very long time, and the issue of his citizenship could – and should – have been raised long before February 2020. Why was that not done? Mr. Calida has been Solicitor General for almost four years and Mr. Marcoleta has been a party-list Representative for more than a decade. Mr. Lopez should have been quo warrantoed while he was running ABS-CBN.
And how about the labor and tax cases that have been raised of late by the Calida-Marcoleta tandem? Shouldn’t DOLE (Department of Labor and Employment) and BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue) have established ABS-CBN liability long ago? Why did they wait until the last days of ABS-CBN’s franchise? Had these and the other negative issues – such as the PDRs and Mr. Lopez’s citizenship – been addressed on a 24/365 basis, the only things needing to be taken up in relation to ABS-CBN’s new franchise application would have been whether the Kapamilya network had made satisfactory use of the broadcast frequencies that the government had assigned to it.
This brings us back to the question that has arisen in sensible Filipinos’ minds in the wake of the ABS-CBN fiasco. Why are the Calida-Marcoleta tandem’s negative issues being raised only now (Filipino translation: Bakit ngayon lang?) The logical corollary question is, were the concerned regulatory agencies sleeping on the job?