British Virgin Islands
15,182
Panama
9,611 Seychelles Niue
Countries with the most active intermediaries
The 10 most popular tax havens
The most active clients by number of offshore company incorporations were from Hong Kong, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Offshore bank accounts and other financial dealings in another country can be used to evade regulatory oversight or tax obligations. Panama, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda are among more than a dozen small, low-tax locations that specialize in handling business services and investments of non-resident companies.
15,915 1,260
148 3,253
Bahamas
Russia
32,682
United Kingdom
452
Nevada British Anguilla
5,307
Hong Kong
8,624
United Kingdom
Samoa
113,648
48,360
3,541
5,058
Isle of Man
British Virgin Islands
Panama
15,182
Panama
9,611
15,479 34,301
7,157 Luxembourg
Switzerland
5,174
37,675
Hong Kong
4,050
Cyprus
Singapore
Uruguay Source: ICIJ, AP Graphic: Staff, Tribune News Service
Seychelles Niue
Countries with the most active intermediaries
THE LATEST: PANAMA PAPERS n Venezuela’s chief prosecutor has ordered banks to freeze the accounts of people the country is investigating in connection with leaked documents that originated with a Panama-based law firm that helps set up secretive offshore bank accounts and shell companies. n Hungary’s prime minister says authorities have set up special investigative units to review any Hungarian aspects of the recently revealed offshore accounts. n Spain’s acting minister of industry, energy and tourism says he never ran or owned a Bahamian offshore company, and doesn’t know why his name appeared on leaked documents identifying him as a firm director. n British Prime Minister David Cameron has lashed out at “deeply hurtful and profoundly untrue” claims made about his late father’s financial arrangements. Cameron told lawmakers in the House of Commons on Monday his father set up an offshore firm for investment purposes and not to avoid tax. n A Spanish digital news site has published documents showing that Spain’s acting minister of industry, energy and tourism was a director of a Bahamian offshore company in 1992, three years before he entered politics. AP Related story on A9
The most active clients by number of offshore company incorporations were from Hong Kong, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Isle of Man
3,541
BusinessMirror
5,058
Russia
15,479
32,682 8,624
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34,301
United Kingdom
7,157
Luxembourg
Switzerland
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5,174
Panama
37,675
Hong Kong
Cyprus
4,050
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Wednesday, April 13, 2016 Vol. 11 No. 186
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FARMERS, INDIGENOUS PEOPLES GO HUNGRY AS THEY LOSE LIVELIHOOD
Feeding 1M farmers now a problem due to El Niño
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_enren
HE number of Filipino farmers who could lose their livelihood due to the ongoing El Niño episode could exceed a million, according to a labor expert from the University of the Philippines (UP).
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Dr. Rene E. Ofreneo, former dean of the UP School of Labor and Industrial Relations (Solair), said the possibility that more than a million farm workers could be displaced by the drought is not remote. “El Niño is happening all over the country, so the level of displacement and the gravity of the problem is so
serious and comprehensive,” Ofreneo told the BusinessMirror in a phone interview. Citing data from the Philippine Statistics Authority, Economic Planning Secretary Emmanuel F. Esguerra said the agriculture sector has recorded a net employment loss of 935,000 in
935,000
January 2016. The government attributed this to weak farm output due to El Niño, which peaked in December 2015. In October last year the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines had projected that the number of farmworkers who could be displaced by El Niño could reach 1 million.
Cloud seeding: Making a tested technology even better
ARRESTED farmers listen to final instructions before they are whisked away for their jail destination last Friday in Kidapawan City. MANUEL T. CAYON BY F V. E |
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@elefantefil
Special to the BM
HE idea of getting the rain to fall used to be the stuff of myth, legend or science fiction. The classic tale is of a shaman performing a ritual to summon rain to fall to quench the thirst of a parched land. In science fiction, the idea was known as weather manipulation. Technology, not religious mumbo-jumbo, became the key to extracting enough moisture from the sky to make it rain. Cloud seeding, as a practical tool for weather manipulation, was discovered accidentally in 1946 in the United States. Seventy years later, it is now considered a statistically reliable tool to increase precipitation in areas in need of moisture. In the Philippines it has been used as constant institutional tool to deal with the effects of long dry spells or drought. The first thing that comes to mind when one reads about cloud seeding is that it should produce rain. And when such efforts produce no rainfall, the automatic reaction was that it failed. It’s not that simple.
INSIDE
VR HARDWARE IS FINALLY HERE: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Evaporation rate
STILL BULLISH SM Prime Holdings Inc. officials on Tuesday reported good financial results with strong income growth at the company’s stockholders’ meeting, attended by (from left) SM Prime President Hans Sy, Corporate Secretary Elmer Serrano and SM Prime Chairman Henry Sy Jr. Story on page A12. NONIE REYES
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WHO ARE ALL THESE OLD PEOPLE?
B MA. S F. A Special to the BM
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“ONE thing that people have to consider is the evaporation rate,” Thelma A. Cinco of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) said. Cinco’s office comes up with climate-assessment reports that are designed to help the agricultural industry to adapt to changing climate conditions. “You have a limited supply of water for consumption,” explained C A
Remittance firms, forex dealers unregulated–BSP @Pulitika2010
IMAGE
Farmers suffer El Niño’s wrath
Number of agricultural workers who already lost their source of livelihood due to El Niño, according to government data
T. Anthony C. Cabangon Publisher @antoncab12 @
LIFE
BMReports
OC A L remittance fir ms are operating in the Philippines virtually unregulated, which could give rise to potential instances of money laundering and other illicit transactions. Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Deputy Governor for the Supervision and Examination Sector
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 46.1150
Nestor A. Espenilla confirmed to the BusinessMirror that while remittance agents—like foreignexchange dealers and money changers—are required to register with the monetary authority, the central bank does not have direct supervision over remittance firms. “There is no law today that explicitly places the remittance business under BSP revision, unlike banks, nonstock savings and loan associations, or even pawnshops,” he said. “Yes, we register them like
There is no law today that explicitly places the remittance business under BSP revision.” —E
foreign-exchange dealers/money changers, but only for the narrow purpose of getting them to comply with the Anti-Money Laundering Act, since that law includes them as a covered institution. Thus, the oversight is quite limited.” This developed as Internal Revenue Commissioner Kim S. JacintoHenares disclosed to senators in Tuesday’s continuing hearing of the bank heist that Philippine Remittance Ltd. (PhilRem) has not been paying the correct taxes since 2005.
“They are registered with us as a land-transportation contractor, not as a money changer or remittance company. They amended their articles of incorporation in 2005, but didn’t update their registration with us,” Henares underscored. “So the taxes that they have been paying are wrong. As a nonbank financial intermediaries, they’re supposed to pay a 5-percent gross receipts tax, not a VAT [value-added tax].” S “R,” A
n JAPAN 0.4272 n UK 65.6585 n HK 5.9473 n CHINA 7.1408 n SINGAPORE 34.3322 n AUSTRALIA 35.0105 n EU 52.6034 n SAUDI ARABIA 12.2993
Source: BSP (12 April 2016 )
A2 Wednesday, April 13, 2016
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Farmers suffer El Niño’s wrath Cinco, head of the Pagasa Impact Assessment Application Section, Climatology and Agronometerology Division. “To make it last, you ration the water. But it’s not just consumption. There’s also evaporation to consider.” “For example, the evaporation rate for a given area is 5 millimeters [mm] per day. To maintain an ample amount of moisture in that area, it must receive an average of 150 mm of rainfall per month,” she said. “But that’s assuming there is still moisture in the area. During a drought, the problem is that there is no longer moisture in that area.” When drought impacts the water supply, crop failure and reduced irrigation occurs. However, the drought’s effect is not confined to the agricultural industry. The reduced water supply will result in less water for domestic use and adversely affect electrical production from hydropower sources. Power outage CINCO explained that the drought and dry spell currently prevailing in Mindanao is comparable to the effects of El Niño that hit the country in 1998. Records show during that year,
water shortage in hydropower facilities reduced power generation to just 34.61 gigawatt-hours (GW h), down from the previously recorded 10-year average of 133.59 GWh. This was a staggering 74.1-percent reduction, resulting to power outages of several hours in Mindanao. Many expressed fears these outages will occur anew. At present, publicly available records show that the Mindanao electrical grid has a capacity to generate 1,445 megawatts (MW). However, the recorded peak demand for electricity is 1,458 MW. The generating capacity is short by 13 MW. The deficit may increase with the onset of summer. “The El Niño effects will persist, most probably until June,” Cinco said. This means the priority for cloud-seeding operations are water-catchment areas, such as dams and lakes, because they both serve as the sources for hydropower, irrigation and water for human consumption. Ma. Cecilia Monteverde, the weather bureau’s technical supervisor for its cloud-seeding project, agreed with the assessment. This is where cloud seeding becomes a vital part of the drought
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the amount of rainfall produced in cloud-seeding operations. “Science is a work in progress,” Monteverde said. “We always look at data to find out which method works best. This is an investment. We find out what works best and turned that method over to the BSWM.” A side f rom resea rc h a nd development, the scientists and technical experts of the weather bureau play another crucial role for cloud-seeding operations. “We determine if conditions are favorable for the conduct of cloud-seeding operations,” Monteverde said. “We use Doppler radar, upper air soundings, and other tools to detect and monitor the movement of potential seedable clouds,” Moron added.
Unfavorable conditions MOBILE radar Pagasa uses during cloudseeding operations. (Left) Pagasa is testing powdered salt to improve the efficiency of cloud-seeding operations.
on research to improve the methodology for cloud-seeding operations conducted by the BSWM [Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Soil and Water Management], which is the mandated agency.”
For agricultural areas, cloudseeding operations provide temporary relief because the water easily evaporates.”—P
Zambo lessons
If the climate is hot enough, the rainfall evaporates before reaching the ground.” —P and dry-spell mitigation effort, according to Monteverde. “The first principle in cloud seeding is the presence of seedable clouds that can generate rainfall,” she explained. “Even if you have the seeding materials and there are no seedable clouds, we cannot generate rainfall. These seeding materials cannot form a cloud that can produce rain.”
Too hot
PAGASA Cloud Seeding Project Coordination Officer Lorenzo A. Moron said “conditions must be favorable in order to produce rainfall.” “When conditions are favorable, the seeding materials enhance rainfall,” Moron added. “Clouds contain moisture,” Monteverde said. “However, not all clouds contain enough moisture to form rainfall that reaches the ground. The seeding materials are used to generate enough moisture to form large enough particles for rainfall that can reach the ground.” Moron cited as example their recent cloud-seeding project in Zamboanga. “If the climate is hot enough, the rainfall evaporates before reaching the ground,” Moron explained. “That’s what happened in Zamboanga. The heat evaporates the precipitation on the way down.” Moron pointed out that the best period to conduct cloud-seeding operations is before the onset of the dry spell or drought. “Any cloud-seeding operations conducted after that can produce some rainfall, but the moisture available will not be enough,” he added. “Our cloud-seeding operation is not a full-blown operation in nature,” Monteverde said. “We are under a science agency, so we focus
MORON considered their attempt at Zamboanga as “not a total failure nor was it a total success.” “The cloud-seeding operation did produce rainfall. Unfortunately, the rainfall occurred outside the target area,” he said. “It may not have provided a significant increase of water for the watershed, other people still benefited from the rain.” Water-catchment areas and watersheds are areas that Pagasa targets for its cloud-seeding operations. “Other sectors are a second priority for our operations,” Moron explained. “The [DA-BSWM] is the lead agency for conducting cloudseeding operations focused on agricultural areas.” Monteverde then emphasized the biggest drawback in all cloudseeding operations. “Even if a cloud-seeding operation is well-funded, if there are no seedable clouds, no rainfall can be produced,” she warned. “ T hat’s why cloud-seeding operations must be approached through a scientific matter,” Moron said. “We use various tools to determine the presence of ‘seedable’ clouds in a target area.” He added that a “seedable” cloud arrives only after “several days.” These scientists look for low lying cumulus convective clouds. Once such a cloud is spotted, the cloud-seeding aircraft then disperses a seeding material into the cloud. This is usually iodized salt.
New types
PAG A S A , t h e g o v e r n m e nt ’s weather-monitoring agency, is now testing a new type of seeding material to improve the effectiveness of cloud-seeding operations in the Philippines. “We are now testing a new type of salt,” Monteverde said. “Before, we used iodized salt. The new type is more of a powder because the finer the salt, the more moisture it can attract.” “This new type is more buoyant in the air, giving in more time to attract more moisture in the atmosphere,” Moron added. “We can seed a larger area with 1 gram of the new powdered salt compared to 1 gram of the standard iodized salt.” Monteverde explained that this new powdered salt has an additive to prevent it from clumping together, which helps maintain its powdery form. Both Monteverde and Moron expressed confidence that Pagasa’s efforts will pay off by increasing
DESPI TE unfavorable cond itions, Moron said the weather bureau went ahead with the cloud seeding in Zamboanga, which was held in February. “For Zamboanga, based on climatology and climate records, there is really very little rain there during February,” he said. “It’s really dry and unfavorable for cloud- seeding operations. However, since it was an urgent request, we went ahead and used the opportunity to conduct further research and tests during the cloud-seeding operation. Despite the unfavorable conditions, we were still able to generate some rainfall.” At least, according to him, the cloud-seeding operations provided relief, “especially when the target area is a dam, because a dam can store rainfall.” He also explained the reality when cloud-seeding operations are conducted in agricultural areas, especially over upland farms. “For agricultural areas, cloudseeding operations provide temporary relief, because the water easily evaporates,” Moron pointed out. There was one other beneficial effect that can occur even if a cloud-seeding operation does not produce rain. “One other point for cloud-seeding is this: Even in instances that rainfall is not produced, cloudseeding operations can lower the temperature to slow down evaporation,” Monteverde explained. “ That is one positive impact. The seeded clouds tend to grow bigger. Bigger clouds over bodies of water help reduce the rate of evaporation.”
Failures
MONTEVERDE admitted “sometimes cloud-seeding operations over Angat Dam do not produce rainfall.” “However, it was established that after the cloud-seeding operation, the rate of evaporation in the dam fell, helping the dam to sustain its water supply longer.” Moron explained, “The general objective of cloud seeding is to augment freshwater resources.” “And when we talk of freshwater resources, it is used for multiple activities,” Moron said. “[This resource is not only for domestic consumption, it is also for commercial and industrial purposes, such as agriculture and power generation.” “Cloud-seeding operations must be multipurpose in approach,” he said. “We should not be conducting cloud-seeding operations solely to have water to drink. Cloud seeding is meant to increase freshwater resources for multiple uses and activities.” “Cloud-seeding operation is not a guarantee that we will produce actual rainfall, because conditions vary from place to place,” Monteverde added. “We, in Pagasa, are conducting research to determine the best conditions to help enable the present technology available to work efficiently.”
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Govt got ₧18.42B from Malampaya B L L
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@llectura
HE Philippine government received last year $400 million (roughly P18.42 billion) as its share of the income from the Malampaya deepwater gas-to-power project, an official of the Malampaya consortium said. Sebastian Quiniones, managing director of Shell Philippines Exploration B.V. (SPEX), said last year’s remittance br ings the total royalties remitted to the government since the successful commissioning of the of fshore Pa l aw a n projec t i n 2001 to $8.7 billion. SPEX is the upstream company leading the consortium that operates the Malampaya project.
“As of end last year, the total stood at $8.7 billion since the project’s inception,” Quiniones told the BusinessMirror. “For 2015 alone, the government’s share amounted to $400 million.” The amount is what the chairman of Nike Inc. reportedly pledged to give to Stanford University for a corporate social-responsibility program addressing poverty and climate change.
Court of Appeals asks OCA to probe Parañaque judge over Uniwide Holdings case B J R. S J @jrsanjuan1573
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HE Court of Appeals (CA) has referred to the Office of the Court Administration (OCA) for investigating a trial court judge who stopped the implementation of a final and executory decision it issued and affirmed by the Supreme Court (SC). T he C A dec i sion t h at t he judged stopped from being implemented ordered the eviction of wholesale and retail chain Uniw ide Holdings Inc. (UHI) from the Coastall Mall property in Parañaque City and to pay almost P1 billion in unpaid rental and liquidated damages. In a 20-page decision written by Associate Justice Ramon Cruz, the CA’s former Seventh Division said the actuations of Judge Rolando How of Branch 257 of the Regional Trial Court in Parañaque were “an affront to the CA and SC.” “His attempt to forestall a final and executory judgment of no less than the highest tribunal of the land constitutes a disrecpectful and insolent defiance of the authority and impedes the speedy administration of justice,” the CA ruled. On March 4, 2015, the SC issued an entry of judgment stating that the order by the Metropolitan Trial Court (MTC) in Parañaque City Branch 78 on September 28, 2010, and the CA ordering UHI to vacate the 100,000-square-meter property of Manila Bay Development Corp. (MBDC) owned by businessman Jacinto Ng has become final and executory. However, in an order issued on November 5, 2014, How granted the petition filed by UHI seeking the issuance of a writ of preliminary injunction against the implementation the said final and executory decision, saying that the order to vacate was “premature and void”. “Had he thoroughly reviewed the records of the case, it would have been impossible for him to miss or to misread the import of
the said resolutions. By his acts, Judge Rolando How has tried to prevent MBDC from enjoying the fruits of its hard-earned legal victory,” the CA said. “In effect, he has been tying the hands of justice and preventing it from taking its due course. His conduct has thwarted the due execution of a final and executory decision,” the appellate court added. The CA said How must answer why he should not be sanctioned for his failure to properly apply the relevant laws, rules and jurisprudence. “When the laws are sufficiently basic, a judge owes it to his office to simply apply it, and anything less than that would be constitutive of gross ignorance of the law,” the CA pointed out. Concurring with the ruling were Associate Justices Noel Tijam and Romeo Barza. In 1993 MBDC leased to businessman Jimmy Gow the subject property at the Central Business Park II Complex, Reclamation Area in Parañaque City. Gow subsequently assigned his rights and interests to UHI, which failed to pay monthly rentals. MBDC also discovered that UHI had not been paying realty taxes on the improvements it made on the property. This prompted MBDC to file a complaint for unlawful detainer and damages before the MTC in Parañaque, seeking to direct UHI to vacate the premises and to pag their rentals in arrears and reimburse MBDC for payments made on realty taxes. In a ruling issued in September 2010, the MTC in Parañaque directed UHI to vacate the subject proper t y and to pay MBDC the amount of P715.73 million, representing accr ued renta ls and liquidated damages, w ith lega l interest at the rate of 6 percent per year from the date of judg ment. The CA affirmed the said ruling with some modifications, which prompted UHI to elevate the matter before the SC. In a resolution issued on April 7, 2014, the SC denied
By his acts, Judge Rolando How has tried to prevent MBDC from enjoying the fruits of its hard-earned legal victory.” —C A
Quiniones said last year’s payment was lower than the previous years’ remittances, because of the decline in the prices of oil and gas, which had an impact on pricing. “The $400-million remittance in 2015 was much lower than a year ago, because the price of oil plunged during the year as compared to 2014,” the SPEX official said. In 2014 the consortium remitted around $900 million in royalty payment. “Oil prices have dropped by half so roughly speaking, the amount that was remitted turned out also,” Quiniones said. A basket of indexes, including oil prices, dictates the price of gas that is sold by the consortium to power producers utilizing the natural gas to fire up their power plants. T he i nd i ge nou s g a s f rom the f ield f uels three natura l gas-fired power stations with a total generating capacity of 2,700 megawatts, accounting for roughly 45 percent of Luzon’s power-generation requirements. These power plants are the
2.7T The total cubic feet of natural-gas reserves located some 3,000 meters below sea level discovered at the Malampaya natural-gas field in the West Philippine Sea
1,000-MW Santa Rita and the 500 -MW San Lorenzo plants, ow ned by t he L ope z Group; and the 1,200-MW Ilijan plant, owned by Kepco Philippines. Ma l a mpaya roya lt ies have so far been used for the fuel requirements of the National Power Corp.-Small Power Utilities Group (NPC-SPUG) amounting to P2 billion; Pantawid Pasada program, P450 million; and P423 million for the purchase of
the USS Hamilton cutter marine vessel to strengthen the security perimeter of the Malampaya Natural Gas Project. The Malampaya project is a joint undertaking of the Philippine government and the private sector. The project is spearheaded by the Department of Energy, and developed and operated by SPEX with a 45-percent stake on behalf of joint-venture partners Chevron Malampaya Llc.—also with a 45-percent stake—and PNOC Ex ploration Cor p. T he latter holds the remaining 10 percent. Under the ser vice contract agreement, 70 percent of the g ross proceeds f rom the sale of natural gas would go to the contractor to recover the investment cost. The remaining 30 percent is shared by the government and the consortium on a 60 - 40 basis, respectively. Upon its discovery, Malampaya had about 2.7 trillion cubic feet of natural-gas reserves and 85 million barrels of condensate,
located some 3,000 meters below sea level. Last year the consortium inaugurated a new offshore platform that would maintain the level of gas production to fulfill commitments under existing gas sales agreements, thus ensuring the steady supply of natural gas to power the Luzon electricity grid. The new offshore platform— Deplet ion Compression Pl atform (DCP)—is adjacent to the e x ist ing Ma l a mpaya Sha l low Water Platform, located some 50 k i lometers of fshore f rom Palawan in western Philippines. Both the existing Sha l low Water Platfor m and the new DCP are desig ned to w ithstand t yphoons and earthquakes which the Philippines ex per iences. “Malampaya is a symbol of the country’s continuous journey toward energy self-sufficiency,” Quiniones said. “The commissioning and start-up of its latest phase is a testament to what the Filipino work force can achieve to fuel the country’s growth and progress.
Cuisia to China: Don’t turn shoal into island
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PH I L I PPI N E d iplom at warned on Tuesday that any Chinese move to turn a disputed shoal, where the US Navy recently spotted a suspected Chinese survey ship, into an island will escalate the disputes in the South China Sea, and asked Washington to convince Beijing not to take that “very provocative” step. Ph i l ippine A mba ssador to Washington Jose Cuisia Jr. told a news conference in Manila that a senior US Navy official reported spotting a suspected Chinese survey ship in the Scarborough Shoal a few weeks ago and expressed concern about its presence in the disputed offshore area. The Philippine military checked but found nothing, possibly because the Chinese ship later left the shoal, he said. China has said it has completed construction work to turn seven reefs into islands in the disputed Spratlys archipelago in the South China Sea, raising alarm in the region and sparking calls by Asian and Western governments for China to stop taking provocative actions that can lead to confrontations. Beijing says it owns the Spratlys, which it calls the Nansha Islands, and has a right to undertake construction there. The US Navy sighting of the survey ship in Scarborough, a rich fishing area about 230 kilometers (145 miles) west of the Philippines, has reinforced suspicions that Beijing is eyeing the vast atoll as its next target in its island-making spree, Cuisia said. “That, I think, will be very provocative if they will build on Scarborough Shoal,” Cuisia said, adding such an action “will further escalate the tensions and the conflict.” The Philippines is incapable of stopping China from constructing an island in the shoal, where Filipino fishermen have been barred by Chinese coastguard ships, Cuisia said. “We hope that the US and other countries...would convince China not to proceed with that,” he said. Washington does not take sides in the disputes involving China, the Philippines and four other governments but has declared that ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight in the busy waters is in its national interest. Cuisia said he was involved in a US State Department-brokered deal for China and the Philippines to withdraw their ships simultaneously from Scarborough to avoid a potential clash during a tense standoff in 2012. China reneged on that deal by refusing to withdraw its ships, after
PHILIPPINE Defense Secretary Voltaire T. Gazmin pours champagne on the nose of the C-130T military transport plane that was acquired from the US as part of the armed forces modernization program during a ceremony on Tuesday in Pasay City. US Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg (fourth from left), who also attended the commissioning ceremony, announced the aircraft is one of the two aircraft to be delivered in the first quarter of the year with a total value of $55 million. Others in photo are (from left) Army Chief Lt. Gen. Eduardo Ano, Air Force Chief Lt. Gen. Edgardo Fallorina and Armed Forces Chief Gen. Hernando Iriberri. AP
That, I think, will be very provocative if they will build on Scarborough Shoal.” —C the Philippines did and now claims there was no such deal, he said. “We were shortchanged,” Cuisia said. China, meanwhile, said the Group of Seven(G-7) nations should stop inflaming territorial disputes in Asian waters and focus its energy on dealing with a slumping global economy. This was in response to G-7 calls for countries to stop land reclamation and militarization in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. “China is strongly dissatisfied with relevant moves taken by G-7,” Foreign Minister Spokesman Lu Kang said in a statement on Tuesday. “We urge G-7 members to abide by their promise of not taking sides on territorial disputes, respect the efforts by regional countries, stop all irresponsible words and actions, and make constructive contribution to regional peace and stability.” The G-7 should have focused on righting a sluggish global economy, “instead of hyping up maritime issues and fueling tensions in the region,” he said. Lu’s remarks were in response to G-7 foreign ministers raising concerns over tensions in the East China Sea and South China Sea,
where China has been more aggressively asserting its territorial claims under President Xi Jinping. China “resolutely upholds its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests,” in the waterways, Lu said.
Artificial islands
SINO-JAPANESE tensions have been on the rise over a chain of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea claimed by both countries, while China’s bid to control more than 80 percent of the South China Sea overlaps with claims of five other countries. China has constructed artificial islands there, some with airstrips capable of landing military aircraft. Last year the US began to challenge China in the South China Sea by sailing warships near the islands in so-called freedom of navigation operations. T he G -7 foreig n ministers urged “all states to refrain from such actions as land reclamations, including large-scale ones, building out outposts, as well as their use for military purposes and to act in accordance with international law, including the principles of freedoms of navigation
and overflight,” in a statement released at the close on Monday of a two-day meeting in Hiroshima. The statement didn’t mention China directly, which is a not a G-7 member. None of the five other states claiming territory in the South China Sea participated in the meeting. An editorial in the official Xinhua News Agency accused Japan of trying to use the G-7 to “contain China” and trying to divert China’s attention from the East China Sea by “interferring in disputes in the South China Sea.” The South China Sea is a fertile fishing ground and hosts $5 trillion in annual shipping. Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also have claims in the South China Sea that fall within China’s nine-dash line, the delineation of its claims that first appeared on a 1947 map. China has deployed missiles, radars and fighter jets in territory it controls in the area and has stepped up its naval patrols in the waters and regular drives off Southeast Asia fishermen. “The G-7 is going through the motions of making it clear to China that if they do something more, there will be a cost to bear,” said Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. “The G-7 statement gives the Americans a much stronger base to go to their key allies, including Australia, to get them to act in concert with them.” AP, Bloomberg News
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Cambodian police charge critic of border policy
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AMBODIAN police have charged an opposition lawmaker who has been a strong critic of the government’s handling of demarcating the border with neighboring Vietnam, reviving a campaign of pressure Prime Minister Hun Sen launched last year against his foes and critics. Um Sam An was arrested on Monday and charged on Tuesday, apparently in connection with his remarks last year on the border issue. Journalists were not allowed into the court. He was charged with incitement to commit a criminal act and inciting prejudice against another country and faces up to five years in prison if convicted, said his defense lawyer Sam Sokong. The charges carry penalties of up to two years in prison and three years, respectively. One of his colleagues in the Cambodia National Rescue Party, Sen. Hong Sok Hour, is facing trial on several charges after making similar criticisms last year implying that the government failed to counter land encroachment by Vietnam, Cambodia’s traditional enemy. Hun Sen has been in power for three decades. While Cambodia is formally democratic, his government is authoritarian and known for intimidating opponents. Last year he put an end to an uneasy detente with the opposition party, with which he had reached a political truce in 2014 to end a boycott of parliament. The opposition mounted a surprisingly strong challenge against Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party in the 2013 general election, which it accused the government of stealing. The opposition has faced physical
and legal intimidation, and politically motivated legal actions against charismatic opposition leader Sam Rainsy have convinced him to stay abroad. The opposition, for its part, had sought to capitalize on its election gains by hitting Hun Sen on the sensitive issue of relations with Vietnam, with some of its lawmakers charging that Cambodia was losing land to its neighbor. Hong Sok Hour was arrested last August after Hun Sen accused him of treason for an online posting, which included the purported text of a 1979 treaty with Vietnam that declared that their mutual border would be dissolved. Hun Sen, who was foreign minister at the time in a government installed by a Vietnamese occupation force that invaded Cambodia to oust the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, insisted the treaty was forged. Hong Sok Hour apparently had reposted a bad translation of a document he found on the Internet, and was indicted on three charges, including falsifying public documents, using fake documents and inciting chaos. The charges carry maximum sentences of 10 years, five years and two years, respectively. Um Sam An, who pursued the same issue, was arrested in the northeastern city of Siem Reap shortly after midnight on Sunday. He had just returned from a trip to the United States. His Cambodia National Rescue Party decried his arrest, saying it breached his immunity as a lawmaker. The government rejects such claims, saying such arrests are allowable because the lawmakers have been caught in the act of committing a crime. AP
Editor: Max V. de Leon • Wednesday, April 13, 2016 A5
Alibaba expands in Southeast Asian market via Lazada deal
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LIBABA Group Holding Ltd. expanded its e-commerce footprint to fast-growing Southeast Asia with a $1-billion deal for control of Lazada Group SA, as it seeks more sales from beyond China.
The company will pay $500 million for new shares in the closely held company and also purchase stock from existing investors, Alibaba said in a statement on Tuesday. Investors in Lazada to sell stakes include Rocket Internet SE, Tesco Plc. and Investment AB Kinnevik. Billionaire Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma has set a goal of getting at least half the company’s revenue from overseas, with the Lazada deal adding sales of clothing and electronics in six Southeast Asian markets. While Alibaba has come to dominate e-commerce in its home market, it remains dependent on China for the vast majority of its business. “It has huge cash sitting on its balance sheet so it can do this kind of investment. It’s also seeking for some future growth drivers,” said Marie Sun, an analyst at Morning-
$1B
Value of Alibaba’s agreement with Lazada
star Investment Service. “It needs to find some other place for future growth.” The agreement values all of Lazada at $1.5 billion, Rocket said in a separate statement.
Buying its way in
FOUNDED in 2012 by Rocket, Lazada operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Indonesia, where it competes with Tokopedia and MatahariMall, is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, with 256
million people. “Overseas expansion requires a lot of investment in logistics, it would take Alibaba much longer to build the business from the ground up,” said Li Yujie, an analyst with RHB Research Institute Sdn. in Hong Kong. “What Alibaba could do is integrate the businesses and introduce more existing merchants to Lazada to export their products overseas.” The deal also includes options to buy out certain Lazada shareholders
in a 12- to 18-month period after the deal closes, it said. Credit Suisse Group AG advised Alibaba, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was financial adviser to Lazada. “With the investment in Lazada, Alibaba gains access to a platform with a large and growing consumer base outside China, a proven management team and a solid foundation,” Alibaba President Michael Evans said in the statement. Bloomberg News
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briefs
CHINA REPORT SOUNDS ALARM ON GROUNDWATER POLLUTION
DR. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention speaks about the Zika virus in front of a US map of the ranges of two different types of mosquito on Monday, during the daily news briefing at the White House in Washington. AP/JACQUELYN MARTIN
Zika threat wider than originally thought, White House official says
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ASHINGTON—The Zika virus is a threat to more states than first feared, underscoring the need for Congress to approve the Obama administration’s nearly $2-billion funding request, senior health officials said on Monday. But even as officials were delivering that new warning, Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s office questioned the White House’s approach for combating the virus spread at home and abroad. US health officials warned on Monday that the mosquitos that carry and spread the Zika virus are present in 30 states, not the dozen feared previously. The virus is now believed to affect women throughout their pregnancies, rather than during just the first trimester, Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters at the White House. In addition to being linked to microcephaly, a birth defect, and one serious autoimmune nervous disorder, officials say there are growing links between the virus and neurological conditions. Officials do not expect a wide-scale outbreak in the continental United States, Schuchat said, “but that doesn’t mean we won’t have a big problem.” The health officials warned they lack funds to head that off, even after they transferred nearly $600
million in existing funds from other accounts to anti-Zika efforts. Health agencies need the full a mou nt i n emergenc y f u nding the Obama administration asked for: $1.9 billion, National Institutes of Health Director Anthony Fauci said. Still, he told reporters at the same briefing that he “can’t imagine” Congress won’t eventually dole out the funds, especially as experts learn more. On Capitol Hill Republican lawmakers remain hesitant to cut a $1.9-billion check, especially since the sum would breach federal spending caps. “We’re glad the administration has agreed to our request to use existing Ebola funds to address the Zika epidemic,” Doug Andres, a Ryan spokesman, said in an e-mail. “If additional Zika resources are needed, those funds could and should be addressed through the regular appropriations process,” Andres said. GOP appropriators earlier this month declared victory when the White House decided to shift monies away from
30
Number of US states where Zika virus is present
programs targeting Ebola, malaria and tuberculosis, and toward anti-Zika efforts. “More than a month ago we called on the administration to use existing funding and legal authorities to provide the most immediate and effective response to the Zika outbreak,” House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, Republican-Kentucky, and other senior GOP members of that panel said in an April 6 statement. “We are pleased to
hear today that federal agencies are heeding our call.” Republicans have yet to take a firm position on whether they believe additional Zika dollars will be needed this fiscal year. “We will look carefully at the details of today’s proposal by the administration to ensure the best and most effective use of these funds, and to provide proper oversight,” Rogers and the other appropriators said. “As we move forward, the Appropriations Committee will continue to monitor the changing needs resulting from this unpredictable crisis to assure the resources necessary for the response are available.” Meantime, in an ominous finding, Schuchat said there could be hundreds of thousands of Zika cases in Puerto Rico. Such outbreaks are another reason Congress should allocate the funds, Schuchat and Fauci told reporters. That’s because the US is working closely with Caribbean and Latin American countries on countering the disease, they said. TNS
BEIJING—More than 80 percent of China’s underground water drawn from relatively shallow wells used by farms, factories and mostly rural households is unsafe for drinking because of pollution, a government report says. The Water Resources Ministry study posted to its web site on Tuesday analyzed samples drawn in January from 2,103 wells used for monitoring in the country’s major eastern flatland watersheds. The ministry said that of those samples, 32.9 percent were classed as suitable only for industrial and agricultural use, while 47.3 percent were unfit for human consumption of any type. None were considered pristine, although water in wells in the Beijing area was rated better overall than elsewhere in the northeast. Following the report’s release on Monday, officials sought to reassure the public that most household water used by urban Chinese households is safe because it comes from reservoirs, deep aquifers or rivers that are treated to ensure safety. “The quality of drinking water is good overall,” Chen Mingzhong, director of the ministry’s Department of Water Resources, told reporters at a news conference. Most public attention in recent years has focused on heavy air pollution in Chinese cities, although water and soil contamination are also regarded as serious by environmentalists. Water shortages are also expected to pose an increasing challenge to agriculture, with much of the arid North China Plain reliant on aquifers whose levels are falling fast. China’s major lakes are also heavily polluted, largely due to fertilizer runoff and the dumping of untreated factory waste. AP
ARGENTINA’S FERNANDEZ GETS HERO’S WELCOME BEFORE COURT DATE
BUEÑOS AIRES, Argentina—Supporters of former President Cristina Fernandez gave her a hero’s welcome on Monday night at a Buenos Aires airport before she faces a court over her possible role in an alleged scheme to manipulate Argentina’s currency. Fernandez dominated the political landscape during eight years in office and left last December with high-approval ratings despite economic woes and links to corruptions scandals. Since ending a tenure marked by near daily television speeches and constant tweets, she has lived away from the limelight in her home in the southern province of Santa Cruz. Flanked by police and illuminated by camera flashes, Fernandez smiled and waved at thousands of sympathizers who encouraged her with banners and chants ahead of her testimony on Wednesday. She is being investigated for possible involvement in a purported scheme to manipulate financial markets to keep the Argentine peso’s value inflated, leading to a plunge in central bank reserves. A federal prosecutor also recently asked to include her in two separate investigations involving allegations of money laundering. In addition, a businessman with close ties to her family has been arrested in another corruption probe. AP
Peru’s Keiko Fujimori, ex-finance minister appear headed for a runoff
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IM A , Per u—Kei ko Fujimori, daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, and former Finance Minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski appeared headed for a June runoff to determine the winner of Peru’s presidential race, partial election results indicated on Monday. Keiko Fujimori received 39.5 percent of the votes cast in Sunday’s election, while Kuczynski received 22.1 percent, with more than two-thirds of the ballots counted, according to Peru’s electoral commission, known by its Spanish initials ONPE. About 83 percent of the first-round ballots were counted by late on Monday, officials said. Kuczynski’s lead over candidate Veronika Mendoza, a socialist member of Congress who had about 18 percent of the vote, looked to be enough to ensure him the runoff spot against Fujimori on June 5, analysts said. A winning candidate
needed 50 percent of votes plus one to avoid the second round. Fuji mor i ’s Fuerz a Popu l a r part y a lso scored sig nificant victories in the congressional portion of the election and was on track to win at least 65 of the 130 legislative seats up for grabs. Although the 40-year-old Fujimori, a two-term member of Congress, would seem to be a prohibitive favorite against Kuczynski, polling firms have said the 77-year-old former minister has a chance of beating her in the runoff because of high anti-Fujimori sentiment in Peru. T he elder Fujimor i, who served as president from 1990 to 2000, was convicted in 2009 on corruption and human-rights abuse charges and is serving a 25-year prison term. A significant portion of Peruvians fear his daughter might bring back his authoritarian ways and say they wouldn’t vote for her under any
circumstance. Also warning of a strong Kuczynski challenge was Boston University professor and Peru expert David Scott Palmer, who said the nearly 40 percent of votes collected by Fujimori on Sunday could turn out to be the “ceiling” or maximum support among Peruvians. But Lima-based political science Prof. Alberto Vergara disagreed, saying Kuczynski may have too much ground to make up. He said the second-place finisher in the first round of a presidential election has never won after losing to the first place finisher by such a wide margin. W ho gains the suppor t of Mendoza voters could be critical in determining the outcome of the June election. Popular especially in southern provinces, Mendoza capitalized on growing sentiment against miners and natural gas developers to mount a late surge in the polls. Los Angeles Times/TNS
PRESIDENTIAL candidate Keiko Fujimori waves at supporters from the hotel where she is staying at to await the results of the general elections in Lima, Peru on Sunday. Exit polls pointed to Keiko, the daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori, emerging with the most votes, though not the simple majority needed to avoid a runoff election. AP/MARTIN MEJIA
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A7
AS JOBS GAUGE HITS 5YEAR HIGH
Aussie business confidence surges
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USTRALIAN business confidence jumped and an employment gauge in the survey surged to the highest in almost five years, signaling a healthy job market and reducing the likelihood of an interest-rate cut. The sentiment index doubled to six points last month, according to a National Australia Bank (NAB) Ltd. survey of more than 400 firms conducted from March 23 to 31. The business conditions gauge—a measure of hiring,
sales and profits—climbed to 12, matching the highest level since before the 2008 global financial crisis. The employment index jumped four points to five, its best result since 2011. “This is an especially good result in the context
of a downbeat global economic outlook,” said Alan Oster, chief economist at NAB. “Low interest rates and a more competitive currency, even given recent strength, are expected to remain key drivers domestically. Consequently, our outlook for the economy remains unchanged—and with the nonmining recovery expected to progress further, monetary policy is likely to remain on hold for an extended period.” Australia’s economy is proving resilient in the shadow of recent financial turbulence in China, negative interest rates in Japan and Europe and weaker commodity prices that have combined to increase global risk. The Reserve Bank of Australia
400
Number of firms surveyed by National Australia Bank Ltd.
cut rates to a record-low 2 percent in May last year in an easing cycle designed to cushion the economy from unwinding mining investment and encourage ser v ices industries to pick up the slack. While GDP grew a robust 3 percent last year and the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.8 percent, the
currency rebounded more than 10 percent since mid-January to 75.86 US cents at 11:18 a.m. in Sydney. Traders are pricing in a 36-percent chance of a rate-cut next month, according to swaps data compiled by Bloomberg.
It’s complicated
RBA Governor Glenn Stevens, in a statement after leaving the cash rate unchanged last week, warned that “under present circumstances, an appreciating exchange rate could complicate the adjustment under way in the economy.” The renewed currency conundrum reflects the Federal Reserve’s caution on the speed of its policy tightening and a rebound in iron ore, Australia’s biggest export. It
placed at risk the sustained labormarket improvement and burgeoning tourism and education industries that are boosting services exports’ share of GDP. Yet, Tuesday’s business-confidence report suggests firms are weathering the changes. “With this result, the long-running upward trend in business conditions has resumed, suggesting the nonmining recovery is becoming more entrenched, brushing aside the challenges faced from offshore,” Oster said. “The rise in employment conditions put the index back on its strong upward trend, to be more consistent with solid employment growth outcomes in the official labor statistics.” Bloomberg News
UK’s Cameron defends financial arrangements
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A WOMAN holds a baby in the center for refugees in Sid, about 100 kilometers west from Belgrade, Serbia, on April 8. Migrants are stuck on the Serbian side of the frontier since early March, when Balkan countries abruptly shut their borders to migrants wanting to reach Germany and other seemingly wealthy Western European countries. AP/DARKO VOJINOVIC
Wealthiest 1 percent of Americans live a decade longer
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EW YORK—The wealthiest Americans can expect to live at least a decade longer than the poorest—and that gap, as with income inequality, is growing ever wider. New research in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) shows top-earning Americans gained two to three years of life expectancy between 2001 and 2014, while those at the bottom gained little or nothing. Plenty of research has already shown that health and wealth are intertwined, and that they generally improve in tandem as you move up the income scale. But this year, wildly divergent incomes among Americans and the vanishing middle class have been central issues in a vitriolic race for the White House. The Jama research shows in the starkest terms yet how disparities in wealth are mirrored by life expectancy, and how both are getting worse. Research last year showed that mortality rates are rising among middleaged whites, largely due to suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol. That work, by Princeton University economists Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus
D e at o n , re f l e c t e d e c o no m i c stresses on working-class whites that have, in, turn fueled the ascendancy of Republican Donald Trump and his populist message. The latest paper reinforces the idea that inequality in the US—the issue that’s also driven Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign on the Democratic side—has consequences beyond wealth and income. Take a 40-year-old man in the top 1 percent. He can expect to live, on average, to 87. His counterpart in the bottom 1 percent would be expected to perish, on average, before his 73rd birthday. For women, who live longer on average, the gap was narrower, but still substantial. Life expectancy for the richest women is almost 89, about 10 years longer than the poorest. The authors—economists from Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, consulting firm McKinsey and Co., and the US Treasury’s office of tax analysis— used anonymous Internal Revenue Service data from 1.4 billion tax records over 15 years and matched them to death records from the Social Security Administration. The change between 2001 and
2014 shows that the wealthy are benefiting more from gains in longevity than the destitute. Men among the top 5 percent of earners gained more than two years and women gained almost three. In the bottom 5 percent, life expectancy for men only increased by a few months, and for women, hardly at all. When the researchers looked at how life expectancy changed by geography, there were some bright spots. Among the bottom 25 percent of incomes some regions had longevity gains of more than four years, while others lost more than two years. The differences “suggest that the increasing inequality in health outcomes in the US as a whole is not immutable,” the authors write. The shortest life expectancy in the poorest quartile was in Oklahoma and rust belt cities like Gary, Indiana and Toledo, Ohio. The longest was in cities like New York and San Francisco, “with highly educated populations, high incomes and high levels of government expenditures.” The geographic differences in life expectancy for low-income people weren’t strongly explained
by access to health care, unemployment rates, or housing segregation, the authors write. Instead, lifestyle and behavior were at work: smoking, obesity and exercise. “Individuals in the lowest income quartile have more healthful behaviors and live longer in areas with more immigrants, higher home prices, and more college graduates,” the researchers found. It’s important to note that the relationship between income and life expectancy is complicated. An analysis like this can show associations, but it can’t prove that one factor, like living in a highly educated city, caused people to live longer. “Income is correlated with other attributes that directly affect health,” the authors write, and those attributes aren’t measured in the analysis. Measuring life expectancy at age 40, as this study does, also doesn’t capture important measures of health like infant mortality. Angus Deaton, in a commentary accompanying the Jama research, wrote that “the infamous 1 percent” get an extra 10 to 15 years “to enjoy their richly funded lives and to spend time with their children and grandchildren, and they are pulling
ONDON—Br it ish Pr i me M i n i ster Dav id C a mer on fought back on Monday, after days of criticism over his finances, lashing out at what he called hurtful and untrue claims about his late father’s investments sparked by leaked details about the offshore accounts of the rich and famous. Trying to restore his government’s shaken reputation, Cameron i nsisted that “aspiration and wealth creation are not somehow dirty words” and said Britain was acting to stop evasion in its overseas tax havens. C a me ro n h a s b e e n u nd e r mount ing pressure since his father, Ian Cameron, was identified as a client of a Panamanian law firm that specializes in helping the wealthy reduce their tax burdens. The prime minister initially refused to say whether he had a stake in Blairmore Holdings, an offshore firm established by his father, before acknowledging he had sold his shares in it shortly before he was elected in 2010. “I accept all of the criticisms for not responding more quickly to these issues last week,” Cameron told lawmakers in the House of Commons. “But as I said, I was angry about the way my father’s memory was being traduced.” Cameron said his father had set up an investment fund overseas so it could trade in dollar securities—“an entirely standard practice, and it is not to avoid tax.” He said millions of Britons had investments in such funds through their workplace pensions. Cameron said “there have been some deeply hurtful and profoundly untrue allegations made against my father,” who died in 2010. Revelations about the Cameron f amily finances—found among more than 11 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca—have overshadowed the government’s claim that it is committed to closing tax loopholes. C a meron h a s c h a mpioned greater financial transparency, and is due to host an international anticorruption summit in London next month. A law requiring British companies to disclose who really benefits from their ownership comes into force in June. Cameron said on Monday that Britain’s Crown dependencies and overseas territories—including such tax havens as Jersey and the British Virgin Islands—had also agreed to share beneficial ownership information with UK law-enforcement bodies. The prime minister, a former
PR man with a reputation for shar p political intuition, appeared to be caught off-guard by the tax furor. His office initially insisted that his financial arrangements were private, before acknowledging that Cameron and his wife had sold some £30,000 ($44,000) in shares in the offshore fund shortly before he became prime minister in 2010, to avoid any potential conflict of interest. Finally, on Sunday Cameron published a summary of his tax returns since 2009, becoming the first British leader to do so. The records appear to show that Cameron paid his full share of tax—£75,898 on taxable income of £200,307 in the most recent tax year. But the document also generated a new round of headlines over a £200,000 gift his mother on which Cameron—legally—paid no tax. Cameron said publishing his tax information had been “unprecedented.” He said others who aspired to be prime minister or control the country’s finances should follow suit. But he said extending compulsory tax disclosure to all lawmakers would be “a very big step,” and one he did not recommend. Treasury chief George Osborne and opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn both published details of their own tax returns on Monday. So did London Mayor Boris Johnson, revealed to have paid almost £1 million in tax over the last four years. The tax spat could have repercussions for Britain’s June 23 referendum on European Union membership. Cameron is the leading proponent staying in the EU, and anything that tarnishes his brand could undermine that campaign. In Britain the Panama Papers sparked a furor shot through with the national obsessions of privilege and class. Labour leader Corbyn said Cameron did not “fully appreciate the anger that is out there” about tax evasion. But Conservative lawmaker Alan Duncan accused the prime minister’s critics of hating “anyone who’s even got a hint of wealth in their life.” Vetera n L abou r l aw m a ker Dennis Skinner called Cameron a divisive leader, referring to him as “dodgy Dave.” That was an adjective too far for Commons Speaker John Bercow, who asked Skinner to withdraw the insult or be ejected from the chamber. “I still refer to him as dodgy Dave. Do what you like,” Skinner said, before leaving to calls of “bye, bye” from Conservative lawmakers. AP
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Network of Paris-Brussels attackers exposes a ‘supercell’ of extremism W
White House seeks to share blame for failure in Libya
10
Number of members of an extremist cell
POLICE investigate an area where terror suspect Mohamed Abrini was arrested in Brussels on April 8. AP/GEERT VANDEN WIJNGAERT
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ARIS—The number of people linked to the Islamic State (IS) network that attacked Paris and Brussels reaches easily into the dozens, with a series of new arrests over the weekend that confirmed the cell’s toxic reach and ability to move around unnoticed in Europe’s criminal underworld. From Belgium’s Molenbeek to Sweden’s Malmo, new names are added nearly daily to the list of hardened attackers, hangers-on, and tacit supporters of the cell that killed 130 people in Paris and 32 in Brussels. A computer abandoned by one of the Brussels suicide bombers in a trash can contained not only his will, but is beginning to give up other information as well, including an audio file indicating the cell was getting its orders directly from a French-speaking extremist in Syria, according to a police offi-
cial with knowledge of the investigation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the investigation. Ten men are known to be directly involved in the November 13 attacks in Paris; others with key logistical roles then—including the bomber, a logistics handler, and a hideout scout—went on to plot the attack March 22 in Brussels. But unlike Paris, at least two people who survived the attack have been taken into custody alive, in-
cluding Mohamed Abrini, the Molenbeek native who walked away from the Brussels international airport after his explosives failed to detonate. But investigators fear it may not be enough to stave off another attack. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, another Molenbeek native whose charisma made him a natural draw to many in the Brussels neighborhood after he joined IS extremists in Syria, said before his death that he returned to Europe among a group of 90 fighters from Europe and the Mideast, according to testimony from a woman who tipped police to his location. Patrick Skinner, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer who is now with the Soufan Group security consultancy, described the Brussels-Paris network as a “supercell.” “The hope was that they had died out in the Paris attacks, and obviously that’s not true,” Skinner said in an earlier interview with The Associated Press. “They [authorities] knew who these people were. And they still managed to pull off the first Paris attack, which was the worst attack in France since World War II [WWII], and then under incredible scrutiny, they still pulled off the worst attack in
Belgium since WWII. So this is a highly functioning cell.” Normally, Skinner said, an extremist cell has six to 10 people linked by pre-existing ties. “It makes it very difficult to crack. You’re not sending an informant into this group, because they know each other. So no one new is just walking into this,” he said. “It’s so big, look at the people on the periphery, logistics, the people that are suspected. You’re looking at 50 people. That’s not a cell; that’s a terrorist group.” It was a group already intimately familiar with European law enforcement. Abrini was a petty criminal long before his younger brother was killed in Syria in 2014. Both Abdeslam brothers had brushes with the law, and Brahim spent time in prison for stealing Belgian ID cards—background that took on new importance amid revelations that many people in the IS cell had forged passports. And Abaaoud’s female cousin, Hasna Ait Boulhacen, who died with him on November 18 after finding a hideout for him, was under surveillance in a narcotics operation at the time, although her ties to the man already wanted on terrorism offenses were unknown to French investigators.
The man arrested for renting that fly-by-night flat in Saint Denis, Jawad Bendaoud, had been sentenced to eight years in prison for the accidental killing of a man he described as his “best friend” over a cellphone. The Belgian brothers who blew themselves up on March 22 had ties to violent crime, as did two suspects with ties to Sweden, one dead and one captured this weekend. The latest name to emerge, Osama Krayem, was a delinquent in Malmo, Sweden, before leaving for Syria. Krayem “was the perfect target for radicalization—no job, no future, no money,” said Muhammad Khorshid, who runs a program in the neighborhood of Rosengard to help immigrants integrate into Swedish society. It’s a neighborhood with its own parallels to Molenbeek, and has proven to be fertile recruiting ground for Muslim extremists. Krayem, who like Abrini is suspected of accompanying a suicide attacker on March 22, was detained on Friday. He traveled with Salah Abdeslam through Ulm, Germany, on one of Abdeslam’s many journeys putting extremists into place for attacks, authorities said. Stephane Berthomet, a former French counterterrorism officer who now works as a writer and security consultant in Canada, said the arrest of multiple key suspects would prove crucial. “When there are declarations made by an accomplice, you can confront them and make progress in the discussions with the other suspects,” he said in an interview just ahead of the news of Abrini’s arrest on Friday. The hope, of course, is that anything the suspects say will crack open a network that seems to grow by the day. “There is not a single person at large—there are dozens of people at large. That’s the reality,” Berthomet said. “The reality is that we are dealing with groups that are badly identified, whose organization and evolution we have not analyzed because we focused on repression for years. Information was collected voraciously, but without real analysis.” AP
Egypt’s surrender of islands to Saudi Arabia deepens woes
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AIRO—Egypt’s declared intention to hand over control of two strategic Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia has kicked off a storm of vociferous opposition, laced with stinging satire, and dealt a blow to the pride of many Egyptians at a time when they feel their country is vulnerable and under attack from all sides. The announcement that a team of Egyptian experts has concluded that the islands of Tiran and Sanafir at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba were inside Saudi territorial waters has taken Egyptians by surprise, raising criticism by some that the move amounted to a territorial selloff to the oil-rich Saudis at a time when Egypt’s battered economy needs all the help it can get. Others charged that President AbdelFattah el-Sissi was running the country without transparency or accountability. The agreement must be ratified by parliament, a 596-seat chamber packed with the president’s supporters whose adulation for Saudi Arabia went on display on Sunday when King Salman addressed the legislature. He was received with a standing ovation and his six-min-
ute address was repeatedly interrupted by applause. Lawmakers also recited poetry praising the Saudi monarch. “The government surprised 90 million Egyptians with a decision that we grew up accustomed to its opposite. That’s what made it worrisome and horrifying,” author and analyst Ibrahim Eissa said on his TV show about the declaration that the islands were Saudi. Tiran is the larger of the two islands and is closer to Egypt’s southern Sinai coast. It is associated in the mind of many Egyptians with their country’s four wars against Israel between 1948 and 1973, a time of nationalistic fervor and patriotism. More recently, Tiran has become a popular destination for tourists. Hardly anyone in Egypt had thought of Tiran, the better known of the two islands, as anything but Egyptian territory for generations. But the government now says that Saudi Arabia in 1950 merely placed the islands in Egypt’s custody to defend them against possible attack by Israel. Now, according to that narrative, Riyadh is able to defend the island and is simply
taking its own territory back. News of the expected loss of the islands broke at a particularly vulnerable time, as the country is reeling from a string of public blunders and a host of seemingly intractable problems. Egypt’s economy is ailing after five years of turmoil, an insurgency by Islamic militants has proved resilient and the vital tourism industry has been battered. The crash last October over the Sinai Peninsula of a Russian airliner, killing all 224 people on board, in a suspected terror attack has cut off the flow of Russian tourists who normally frequent the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Mostly desert Egypt is also gripped by fear over the likely reduction of its vital share of the Nile waters as a result of the construction by Ethiopia of a large dam on the river. More recently, the country’s image abroad has taken a beating over the case of an Italian doctoral student whose torture and killing drew attention to the widespread culture of abuse of Egypt’s police. Giulio Regeni’s body, bearing torture marks, was found on a suburban Cairo
road on February 3, nine days after he disappeared. Italian media and Regeni’s family have cast suspicion on the Egyptian police, but the Interior Ministry has consistently denied involvement. Italy recalled its ambassador in Egypt on Friday to protest what it said was Cairo’s lack of cooperation in the Regeni investigation. Khaled Ali, a prominent rights lawyer and a former presidential candidate, has filed a court case to demand that the Egyptian-Saudi agreement on the islands be annulled on the grounds that it violated Egypt’s constitution. Critics also took to social media networks to denounce the deal, creating the hashtag “Awad Sold His Land,” an allusion to the villagers’ taunts in a popular 1960s radio play of a man who sold his plot of farmland—an act that in the past was equated with dishonor in rural Egypt. “Here, here, Pasha, one island for a billion, a pyramid for two and I will throw two statues on top,” Egypt’s best known political satirist, self-exiled Bassem Youssef, tweeted, mimicking the shouts of Egyptian street hawkers selling
souvenirs to foreign tourists. Curiously, the pro-el-Sissi media has gone to great lengths to prove, even justify, Saudi Arabia’s claim to the islands. In the same vein, a Foreign Ministry statement lauded the decision as the fruit of “more than six years of hard and long work.” “Egypt has not surrendered a single square inch of its territory under any condition,” the top state newspaper Al-Ahram said in its Monday editorial. “But it will be unreasonable to deny our brothers their right to holding on to their own territory when all documents prove their ownership.” The two islands control entry to the Gulf of Aqaba and the ports of Eilat and Aqaba in Israel and Jordan, respectively. Tiran lies about six kilometers from Sharm el-Sheikh. Israel captured the islands in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war but returned them to Egypt after the two nations signed a peace treaty in 1979. Under the terms of the treaty, Egypt cannot station military forces on the islands and is committed to ensuring free navigation in the area’s narrow shipping lanes. AP
ASHINGTON—The White House sought on Monday to share the blame for the failed aftermath of the 2011 intervention in Libya, arguing the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) allies asked too few questions about what would follow after dictator Moammar Qaddafi was toppled. A day after President Barack Obama called that failure the worst mistake of his presidency, the White House said Obama believed more should have been done to fill the power vacuum. Although the US played a leading role in that effort, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama’s regrets extended to what “the United States and the rest of the members of our coalition didn’t do.” “The president has tried to apply this lesson in considering the use of military and other circumstances,” Earnest said, “that asking the question about what situation will prevail and what sort of commitments from the international community will be required after that military intervention has been ordered by the commander in chief.” Obama, in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” said his biggest mistake was “probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.” The US in 2011 joined the air campaign in an attempt to prevent Qaddafi’s forces from killing thousands of civilians amid an uprising against his government. Five years later, the country is in chaos, with a UN-brokered unity government trying to assert itself and an alarming presence of Islamic State fighters and other extremists. Obama has conceded that the intervention “didn’t work.” Last month, in interviews published in The Atlantic magazine, Obama called out European countries close to Libya that he said had been unwilling “to put any skin in the game” to ensure stability after the intervention, referring to them as “free-riders.” Earnest said on Monday that the international community had failed to come up with a plan to compensate for the deterioration in Libya’s governing structures following decades of dictatorship. “The point that the president was making was not that any specific ally of the US had utterly failed to follow through on a specific commitment that they had made,” Earnest said. “But rather, that the US and our broader coalition had not succeeded in mobilizing the necessary resources to bring about the scenario that we would have eventually liked to see.” AP
IS takes Syrian town from rebels
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AMASCUS, Syria—Islamic State (IS) militants recaptured a vital border crossing in northern Syria and shot down a government warplane in the country’s west on Monday as the UN’s special envoy urged the warring parties to respect a fragile cease-fire ahead of peace talks set to resume in Geneva this week. UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura’s plea came amid stepped up fighting around the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, and elsewhere in the country’s northern and western provinces. He spoke after meeting with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem in Damascus in preparation for the talks, set to begin on Wednesday in Geneva between the government and an umbrella opposition coalition backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and other Western powers. Earlier on Monday, IS militants captured the strategic town of al-Rai on Syria’s border with Turkey after intense fighting, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The town serves as the IS group’s access point to supply lines and also sits along the road to the IS stronghold in Aleppo province. The latest IS gains show the group is still capable of launching counterattacks as it comes under pressure on different fronts in Iraq and Syria. IS has lost wide areas in Iraq and Syria recently, including the historic central town of Palmyra that was captured by Syrian government forces and their allies. The extremists have also suffered leadership setbacks as US drone strikes in Syria have killed several top IS and Nusra Front commanders and key figures in recent weeks. AP
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Wednesday, April 13, 2016
The World BusinessMirror
news@businessmirror.com.ph • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion
As British royals head to wildlife park in India, rhino killed
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BRITAIN’S Prince William (left) and his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, are greeted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as they arrive for a lunch with him in New Delhi, India, on Tuesday. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are on a weeklong visit to India, their first royal tour in two years. AP/SAURABH DAS
Brazil’s lawmakers push for Rousseff’s impeachment
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RAZILIAN lawmakers pushed President Dilma Rousseff a step closer to impeachment, after a committee in the lower house voted for her ouster in the first formal test of sentiment in Congress. With a tally of 38 in favor and 27 against, a special lower house committee on Monday night recommended the impeachment to proceed on allegations that Rousseff bypassed Congress to illegally finance a budget deficit. The margin was wider than originally forecast, and sets the stage for a showdown when lawmakers vote on the floor of the lower house as early as Sunday, said political analyst Andre Cesar, founder of consulting company Hold Assessoria Legislativa in Brasilia who has followed Brazil’s Congress for 20 years. “The result is still open, but the opposition is gaining ground,” Cesar said. “There is a strong antigovernment sentiment.” An exchange-traded fund of Brazilian stocks rose 3.3 percent in Tokyo following the committee decision, on investor optimism a new government will be better equipped to revive the lagging economy. The real closed before the vote, advancing the most among major currencies amid ex-
38-27 Votes in favor and against the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff done by a congressional committee
pectations the outcome would favor impeachment. Despite the growing support for Rousseff’s ouster, the opposition still lacks the two-thirds majority needed for impeachment to pass in the lower house and advance to the Senate, according to some surveys. Several centrist legislators remain undecided whether to support Rousseff or side with Vice President Michel Temer, who would replace her and whose party abandoned the ruling alliance last month.
The antigovernment organization VemPraRua, “To the Street,” said as of Monday afternoon there were 291 votes for and 128 against impeachment in the lower house. A group of Rousseff allies, including members of her Workers’ Party, said there were 126 votes against the president’s ouster. A survey by Estado de S. Paulo newspaper showed 298 legislators in favor of impeachment, an increase of 64 votes since April 5. According to one senior lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the vote could be decided by a margin of 30 votes.
Temer’s speech
IN one of several surprising twists that have marked a political crisis pushing Brazil deeper into recession, a recording on Monday leaked of Temer addressing the outlines of an administration under his leadership. Opposition legislators said the tape was evidence that Temer was conspiring to overthrow Rousseff and undermined the impeachment process. Other potential pitfalls to a lower house vote on Sunday include government plans to challenge the impeachment process before the Supreme Court, citing among other concerns insufficient legal grounds for her removal from office. Rousseff, 68, who was imprisoned and tortured during Brazil’s two-decade military dictatorship that ended in 1985, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and said that the push to oust her without sufficient evidence would amount to a coup.
Even if Rousseff were to survive impeachment, she still faces the risk of a prolonged power struggle during the remainder of her term through December 2018. Lower House Chief Eduardo Cunha said last week that he could admit nine other requests for Rousseff’s ouster. Also, the electoral court is still analyzing whether to annul her 2014 reelection on allegations it was financed with graft money, charges the administration denies.
Buildup
MEANWHILE, authorities in the capital, Brasilia, have been bracing for mass demonstrations in coming days, erecting metal barriers in the city’s main avenue to separate opposing factions. Residents of São Paulo could be heard banging pots and pans, as well as honking their car horns immediately after Monday’s committee vote. As of Monday afternoon, 184,000 people throughout Brazil signed up on VemPraRua’s Facebook page to demonstrate on Sunday in favor of Rousseff’s ouster. The figure is similar to the number of people who signed up for demonstrations a week before the March 13 protests, which ultimately attracted over 3 million people nationwide. Government supporters gathered in Rio de Janeiro on Monday evening to pressure legislators to stop impeachment. Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, addressed the crowd, comparing efforts to remove the president from office to the 1964 coup that led to a military dictatorship. Bloomberg News
Investigators visit Panama Papers law firm’s office
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ANAMA CITY—Panamanian prosecutors visited the offices of the Mossack Fonseca law firm on Monday to look into its allegations that a computer hacker was behind the leak of a trove of financial documents about tax havens the firm set up to benefit influential people around the globe. Public ministry spokesman Sandra
Sotillo said the visit to the offices of Mossack Fonseca was made by investigators from the intellectual property prosecutor’s office. The firm filed a complaint charging the security breach shortly before media reports appeared last week using the documents to detail how politicians, celebrities and companies around the globe were hiding assets in offshore bank ac-
counts and anonymous shell companies. “Finally, the real criminals are being investigated,” firm cofounder Ramon Fonseca said in a message to The Associated Press. Fonseca has maintained that the only crime which can be taken from the leak was the computer hack itself. He has said he suspects the hack originated outside Panama, possibly in Europe, but
has not given any details. Panama’s government has said it will cooperate with any judicial investigation arising from the documents. Some critics of the government have called for a rapid investigation of the law firm, which is one of the most important in the world for creating overseas front companies. AP
AUHATI, India—With the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge set to visit the world’s largest one-horn rhino park in remote northeastern India, conservationists hope the British royals can help raise global alarms about how blackmarket demand for rhino horns and other animal parts is fueling illegal poaching and pushing species to the brink. But just days before their Tuesday arrival, park officials said yet another rhino had been poached, bringing the total number of rhinos killed in Kaziranga National Park this year to six. Poachers shot the rhinoceros and, while it was still alive, sawed off its horn before fleeing before dawn on Sunday, wildlife official Subasis Das said. Once the dying animal was discovered, park officials rushed to try to save it but were unsuccessful, he said. Prince William and his wife, Catherine planned a visit to Kaziranga specifically to focus global attention on conservation. The 480-square-kilometer grassland park is home to the world’s largest population of rare, one-horned rhinos, as well as other endangered species, including swamp deer and the Hoolock gibbon. The park has overseen major conservation success, with its rhino population increasing from just 75 in 1905 to 2,200 last year. Many give credit to Lady Mary Curzon, a British baroness who reportedly persuaded her husband, Lord George Curzon, to take steps to protect the rhino when he was governor general and viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, when it was still part of the British Empire. “The Royals should focus on global awareness and the success of Kaziranga, a conservation story started by Lady Curzon,” said industrialist Ranjit Borthakur, who heads the Balipara Foundation conservation group in the state of Assam. But as the neighboring human settlements continue to expand, the animals find themselves in increasingly tense competition for habitat. All five of the world’s rhino species are under constant threat from poachers seeking their horns to sell on the black market.
Demand is high in countries, such as China and Vietnam, where people mistakenly believe consuming rhino horns can increase male potency. It does not. Already six rhinos have been poached this year, after 20 were killed in 2015. “The Duke will use this visit to speak out against the lies and violence that threaten this valuable species and the communities that rely on it,” Buckingham Palace said in a statement. “Traffickers in Southeast Asia are now marketing Indian rhino horn as ‘fire horn’ and lying about its increased potency when compared to African horn.” Conservationists say the royal visit couldn’t be coming soon enough. “The British royals’ visit will certainly increase the level of awareness on rhino conservation,” said Bibhab Kumar Talukdar, who heads the local wildlife-protection group Aaranyak. He wants the royals to press China and other countries to curb consumption of rare animal parts, including rhino horns as well as tiger bones and pangolin scales. “We would expect the Duke and the Duchess to convince them to clamp down on such use,” Talukdar said. The royals are expected to arrive on Tuesday evening in the garrison town of Tezpur, in the northeast Indian state of Assam. From there they will travel to an exclusive, 12-cottage jungle resort with thatch rooftops overlooking fields and a river, according to local officials who spoke on customary condition of anonymity. During a two-day stay, they will meet rangers and take a jeep safari through the park. They will also speak with Karbi tribal villagers who live in a nearby hamlet—a meeting that is expected to boost morale among locals trying to protect the area’s wildlife. “The royals’ visit will bring Kaziranga further into the limelight. The villagers around the park will get added encouragement to work harder,” said Anowaruddin Choudhury of the Rhino Foundation for Nature in Northeast India. After visiting the park, the couple will fly to the neighboring kingdom of Bhutan on Thursday morning. AP
JAPAN PREPARES TO RELEASE TRITIUM FROM FUKUSHIMA PLANT
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OKYO—To dump or not to dump a little-discussed substance is the question brewing in Japan as it grapples with the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima five years ago. The substance is tritium. The radioactive material is technically near-impossible to remove from the huge quantities of water used to cool melted-down reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, which was wrecked by the massive tsunami in northeastern Japan in March 2011. The water is still accumulating: 300 tons are still needed a day to keep the reactors chilled. Some is leaking into the ocean. Huge tanks lined up around the plant, at last count 1,000 of them, each hold hundreds of tons of water that have been cleansed of radioactive cesium and strontium but not of tritium. Ridding water of tritium has been carried out in laboratories. But it’s an effort that would be extremely costly at the scale required for the Fukushima plant, which sits on the Pacific coast. Many scientists argue it isn’t worth it and say the risks of dumping the tritium-laced water into the sea are minimal. Their calls to simply release the water into the Pacific Ocean are alarming many in Japan and elsewhere. Rosa Yang, a nuclear expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, based in Palo Alto, California, who advises Japan on decommissioning reactors, believes the public angst is uncalled for. She says a Japanese government official should simply get up in public and drink water from one of the tanks to convince people it’s safe. But the line between safe and unsafe radiation is murky, and children are more susceptible to radiation-linked illness. Tritium goes directly into soft tissues and organs of the human body, potentially increasing the risks of cancer and other sicknesses. “Any exposure to tritium radiation could pose some health risk. This risk increases with prolonged exposure, and health risks include increased occurrence of cancer,” said Robert Daguillard, a spokesman for the US Environmental Protection Agency. The agency is trying to minimize the tritium from US nuclear facilities that escapes into drinking water.
Right after the March 2011 disaster, many in Japan panicked, some even moving overseas although they lived hundreds of kilometers away from the Fukushima no-go zone. By now, concern has settled to the extent that some worry the lessons from the disaster are being forgotten. Tritium may be the least of Japan’s worries. Much hazardous work remains to keep the plant stabilized, and new technology is needed for decommissioning the plant’s reactors and containing massive radioactive contamination. The ranks of Japan’s antinuclear activists have been growing since the March 2011 accident, and many oppose releasing water with tritium into the sea. They argue that even if tritium’s radiation is weaker than strontium or cesium, it should be removed, and that good methods should be devised to do that. Japan’s fisheries organization has repeatedly expressed concerns over the issue. News of a release of the water could devastate local fisheries just as communities in northeastern Japan struggle to recover from the 2011 disasters. An isotope of hydrogen, or radioactive hydrogen, tritium exists in water form, and so like water can evaporate, although it is not known how much tritium escaped into the atmosphere from Fukushima as gas from explosions. The amount of tritium in the contaminated water stored at Fukushima Dai-ichi is estimated at 3.4 peta becquerels, or 34 with a mind-boggling 14 zeros after it. But theoretically collected in one place, it would amount to just 57 milliliters, or about the amount of liquid in a couple of espresso cups—a minuscule quantity in the overall masses of water. To illustrate that point, Shunichi Tanaka, chairman of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, showed reporters a small bottle half-filled with blue water that was the equivalent of 57 milliliters. Public distrust is running so high after the Fukushima accident that Tokyo Electric Power Co., the utility that operates the Fukushima plant and oversees its decommissioning, has mostly kept quiet about the tritium, pending a political decision on releasing the water. AP
A10 Wednesday, April 13, 2016 • Editor: Angel R. Calso
Opinion BusinessMirror
editorial
Let’s strengthen our China policy
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EWS reports coming from Southeast Asian nations in recent days validate the soundness of our policy toward China. The first report states that Vietnam seized a Chinese vessel for intruding into its waters. The second relates that Indonesia chastised China for trying to ram an Indonesian vessel towing a Chinese boat caught violating Indonesian maritime sovereignty. And the third says that Singapore called on China to align its security measures with the economic policies it adopts in its foreign relations. There is a fourth report, this one pertaining to a United Nations commission that expanded Argentina’s maritime territory in the south Atlantic ocean to include the disputed British-occupied Falkland islands. China is engaged in a massive aggressive bullying over Southeast Asia. Our neighbors are actively resisting it. We, who have been bullied the most severely, can do no less. Our resort to international arbitration is correct and proper. The UN commission report saying that booties of imperialism are not beyond the reach of international law also favors us. But this nonconfrontational approach to the issues is not enough. True to the dialectical logic that guides the thinking of most communist parties, China has turned into its opposite. A bosom friend of small developing countries under Chairman Mao, China has turned into their most vicious enemy. Under these circumstances, we have no recourse except to steel our resolve to resist Chinese bullying. We are not a small country. Population-wise, we are individually bigger than France, Germany, the United Kingdom and other West European countries. Moreover, the idea that small nations can never defeat big ones is wrong. Lilliputian Finland held the Soviet bear to a draw in the 1940s. In the first years of World War II, Japan with its 40 million people conquered and overran China with its 700 million people. Concerning the 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam, the opinion of international military observers is that the numerically puny Vietnamese People’s Army outperformed the numerically overwhelming Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Instead of freezing in indecisiveness, let us strengthen our Armed Forces and enter into alliances with friendly countries for mutual defense. The revival of joint military exercises with the United States and the signing of a cooperative agreement with Japan are steps in the right direction. There is a saying that you cannot win on the negotiating table what you have not won on the battlefield. Our own Gen. Victor Corpuz, a personality of somewhat ambiguous political inclination but of unquestioned loyalty to his country, once wrote a paper on how a small country can defeat a big country in war. It’s time we retrieved this paper from the archives, debated it and benefited from its insights. We value our friendship with China and we hope that the next administration will find a way to restore this friendship. But it takes two to tango. For the moment we need to strengthen our national defense, to spank the bully in the neighborhood. Since 2005
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The legal obligations of an employer Susie G. Bugante
All About Social Security
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RECENTLY received a complaint from a Social Security System (SSS) member about the failure of his employer to submit the corresponding report of his salary loan payments so that as far as SSS was concerned, no payments had been made as they were not posted into his account. The member, therefore, was not qualified to renew his loan.
Clearly, in this case, the employer is at fault for not submitting the obligatory report of loan payments. Thus, I thought it timely to remind employers through this column about their obligations under the Social Security Law. The employer is obliged under the SS Law to register as an employer by accomplishing the Employer Registration Form (R-1) and to report all his employees to the SSS for coverage using the Employment Report Form (R-1A). These forms must be submitted together at the nearest SSS branch. The effectivity of the employer’s compulsory coverage with the SSS starts on the first day he hires his first employees. The
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on or before the 10th day after the payment due date. If the employer is registered at the My.SSS online facility, he can submit the Contribution Collection List online. Another obligation of an employer is to deduct from his employees’ salaries the monthly loan amortizations based on the scheduled payment deadlines for SSS member loans and remit the same to the nearest SSS branch with tellering facility, or through accredited banks using the Member Loan Payment Return Form (Form ML-1) on the scheduled payment date. The employer is, likewise, required to submit a monthly report of his employees’ loan amortizations through an accomplished Member Loan Billing Statement (Form ML-2) in electronic media together
with the validated monthly Member Loan Payment Return Form or the SBR and Form ML-1. The Member Loan Billing Statement (Form ML-2) may also be submitted online if the employer is registered in the My.SSS facility. As part of his legal obligation, the employer is required to maintain true and accurate work records of his employees, which include monthly contributions and loan amortizations, if any, and record of sickness, injuries, death of employees in manual or electronic logbook for work-connected accident. Such records shall be open for inspection by the SSS or its authorized representatives quarterly or as often as the SSS may require. Under the law, violations or noncompliance of the legal obligations of the employer may be penalized as provided under Section 28 of Republic Act 8282, or the Social Security Act of 1997. For more details on SSS programs, members can drop by the nearest SSS branch, visit the SSS web site (www.sss.gov.ph), or contact the SSS Call Center at 920-6446 to 55, which accepts calls from 7 a.m. on Mondays all the way to 7 a.m. on Saturdays. Susie G. Bugante is the vice president for public affairs and special events of the SSS. Send comments about this column to susiebugante.bmirror@gmail.com.
The EastWest Bank-Ageas Insurance joint venture Atty. Dennis B. Funa
INSURANCE FORUM
BusinessMirror is published daily by the Philippine Business Daily Mirror Publishing, Inc., with offices on the 3rd floor of Dominga Building III 2113 Chino Roces Avenue corner De La Rosa Street, Makati City, Philippines. Tel. Nos. (Editorial) 817-9467; 813-0725. Fax line: 813-7025. (Advertising Sales) 893-2019; 817-1351, 817-2807. (Circulation) 893-1662; 814-0134 to 36. E-mail: news@businessmirror.com.ph.
employer is given 30 days from date of hiring, to report an employee for coverage to the SSS. The employer is, likewise, obliged to deduct contributions from his employees, pay his share of contributions including Employees’ Compensation, and remit these to the SSS within the prescribed schedule of payments. The employer shall then submit to the nearest SSS branch the monthly report of his employees’ contributions using the Contribution Collection List (Form R-3) in electronic media together with the validated Employer Contribution Payment Return (Form R-5) or the Special Bank Receipt (SBR) and the Form R-5
The employer is obliged under the SS Law to register as an employer by accomplishing the Employer Registration Form (R-1) and to report all his employees to the SSS for coverage using the Employment Report Form (R-1A). These forms must be submitted together at the nearest SSS branch.
I
N January 2016 the Insurance Commission issued a Certificate of Authority for the newly created EastWest Ageas Life Insurance Co. It is a joint venture between East West Banking Corp. (EW Bank) and Ageas Insurance International NV (Ageas), wherein each would have a 50-50 equity stake (it is actually 50 percent plus one share for Ageas and 50 percent minus one share for East West Bank).
It is capitalized at P2.01 billion ($41.08 million), double the requirement under the Amended Insurance Code. Moreover, EW Bank and EastWest Ageas Life have entered into a 20-year exclusive bancassurance distribution agreement. The first CEO of EW Ageas Life will be Hans Loozekoot. The investment signals the continuing confidence of foreign investors in the Philippine insurance market. EW Bank is a universal bank and in 2015 has the seventh-largest bancassurance distribution network with about 433 branches nationwide.
It is among the top 10 local banks in the country. It is a subsidiary of Filinvest Development Corp. (FDC) with 75-percent equity holding, as of end of 2014. FDC was established in 1955 by Andrew Gotianun. EW Bank was created on July 6, 1994. In May 2012 it became a publicly listed bank through an initial public offering. This is EW Bank’s first venture into the life-insurance business. For the year 2015, EW Bank earned P2 billion in net income, which is lower by 3 percent than 2014’s P2.073 billion. Its total assets for 2015 stood at P232.9 billion, 24 percent higher
Ageas SA/NV is among the top 20 insurance companies in Europe. It is Belgium’s largest insurer with headquarters in Brussels. It operates in 14 other countries in Asia, which includes Malaysia, China, India, Thailand and Vietnam. While it is entering the Philippine market, Ageas sold its life insurance business in Hong Kong to JD Capital. With a mature domestic insurance market, Belgian insurance companies are seeking to expand overseas.
than that of 2014. Its current president is Antonio C. Moncupa Jr. Ageas SA/NV is among the top 20 insurance companies in Europe. It is Belgium’s largest insurer with headquarters in Brussels. It operates in 14 other countries in Asia, which includes Malaysia, China, India, Thailand and Vietnam. While it is entering the Philippine market, Ageas sold its life-insurance business in Hong Kong to JD Capital (Beijing Tongchuangjiuding Investment
Management Co.) for HK$10,688 million or €1,230 million. With a mature domestic insurance market, Belgian insurance companies are seeking to expand overseas. Ageas was formerly known as Fortis Holding, a Dutch-Belgian financial services group, but was renamed in April 2010. Ageas traces its roots to Assurances Generales (AG), founded in 1824. In 1990 AG was renamed Fortis. In April 2010 it was renamed to Ageas SA/NV but the Fortis brand name was passed on to BNP Paribas. Since it will be operating from scratch, its information-technology platform will be hosted by SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud with data centers in Singapore and a disaster-recovery server in SAP Hong Kong. Its systems will include policy administration, quotation, underwriting, claims, commissions and others. Advice on the joint venture and the bancassurance agreement were given by London law firm Clifford Chance. Atty. Dennis B. Funa is currently the deputy insurance commissioner for legal services of the Insurance Commission. E-mail address: dennisfuna@yahoo.com.
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Opinion
The story of Joseph
Our presidentiables must learn from ‘Okun’s law’
BusinessMirror
Michael Makabenta Alunan
Teddy Locsin Jr.
FREE FIRE
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T a book signing in Kamuning Bakery, which serves the best tapa rice on the planet, Senate President Ed Angara—yes, it is customary to keep your last official title; mine sadly is Cong, so if I were anointed ruler I would have to add “King”; indeed, Ed Angara said that predicting drought is now a science. El Niño is predicted to happen every two years. Even the severity of this one was scientifically calculated beforehand. And yet, the government did not forewarn the farmers. Nor did the government forearm the farmers against impending drought. Drought has destroyed the second crop, not only in Kidapawan but in Iloilo, too, and most other farming parts of the country. Therefore, there was no call, no call at all, to shoot the farmers. Given the government’s failure, if the government had to shoot, it should have shot itself—or at least, Proceso Alcala. Indeed, way before weather science, God showed us, by historical example, what to do when famine is impending. Joseph was taken out of prison, where he was flung upon suspicion of fooling around with the wife of the Pharaoh’s guard, Potiphar, a eunuch so he had more on his hands than he could do anything with…. Anyway, it was a false accusation, though Potiphar’s wife protested too much, if you ask me. Anyway, Joseph was taken to Pharaoh, who had a disturbing dream, a dream no one in his cabinet of classmates—I mean conjurers—could interpret. Pharaoh told Joseph, “I dreamed of seven kine, [the archaic plural of cows] that came out of the river, exceeding fat and beautiful. They were followed by seven kine that were lean and ugly and who ate the juicy ones”— as happens in life. Pharaoh said further, “And I dreamed of seven fat ears of corn growing from the same stalk as seven ears of corn so lean that they overshadowed the beauty of the fat”—as often happens in life. As you can see, tastes have changed since fat was beautiful. Pharaoh asked, “What doth they portend?” Joseph said, “that there will be seven years of plentiful harvests followed by seven years of none, and famine shall follow”—as surely as his shadow follows a man. Nice touch, I added that. But Joseph went beyond prediction to prescription. He added, “Let Pharaoh appoint a wise and industrious man, unlike unto Alcala, and make him ruler over the land so that he may appoint overseers, who shall gather into barns a fifth part of all the fruits in seven years of plenty. These fruits shall be held in readiness against the seven years of famine that shall oppress the land. In that way the land shall not be consumed with scarcity,” Joseph said. Nor the farmers fired upon, I might add.
Drought has destroyed the second crop, not only in Kidapawan but in Iloilo too, and most other farming parts of the country. Therefore, there was no call, no call at all, to shoot the farmers. Given government’s failure, if government had to shoot it should have shot itself—or at least Proceso Alcala. Indeed, way before weather science, God showed us, by historical example, what to do when famine is impending. To no one’s surprise, because Pharaoh was a good president, he appointed Joseph to be that wise and industrious man to rule second only to Pharaoh over all other officials of the land. Thus, Joseph became The Food Czar. “And so it came to pass, that Joseph laid up grain in the seven years of plenty, so that when the seven years of lean followed, Pharaoh said unto his people, “Don’t come to me, go rather to Joseph, and do all that he shall say to you.” Thereby doing what most leaders do not, give credit where it is due. “The famine increased daily in all the land, and Joseph opened all the barns, and sold”—sold ha!—“to the Egyptians”; for it was assumed that the farmers saved up enough in the years of plenty to tide them over the years of want. But because our people never experienced years of plenty, even in a faux boom economy, they could not save up for years of greater want. So the government should give them Center for Community Transformation to buy rice, so the money goes back to the government. If I were president, by the third day of the farmers’ protest, the highway in Kidapawan would be so jammed with the traffic of ricebearing trucks that you could not see the road beneath. And I would say, even to my political enemies, come, help me, to distribute efficiently, rice to all our people; for I do not give a rat’s ass who you support, so long as we feed the hungry. For only with a full stomach is dignity possible and not with makework for free food, which is an insult to working men and a waste of time and resources. The rest is claptrap.
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ON THE CONTRARY
SIMPLE “rule of thumb” called the Okun’s law, named after 1960’s American economist Arthur Melvin Okun, may still be relevant today, despite becoming outdated the past few decades with the changing components of the economy. n Okun’s guide to high growth. Okun simplified the statistical relationship between employment and GDP with his popular ratio then, which states that for “every 1-percent decline in the unemployment rate, GDP increases by 3 percent. Conversely, he added that if the unemployment rate increases or worsens by 1 percent, GDP falls by 2 percent. For awhile, Okun’s observations were often proven true that his statistical ratios were called “Okun’s law.” More so, when employment then was directly related to production-related activities in industry and agriculture. This has all changed with monetary liberalism, starting with the liberalization of the American dollar from being pegged to gold in August 1971, called then as the “Nixon Shock,” followed by the scrapping of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 GlassSteagall Act with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 that deregulated the banking industry, allowing the unification of com-
mercial and investment banking. n When you can’t bank on banks. Thus, the too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks have abused this privilege and even sucked in government and workers’ pension plans, which were invested, or rather gambled on the lucrative, but highly volatile, hedge funds and derivatives market that have led to the frequent financial bubbles of booms and busts, with the last one bursting during the 2008 global financial crisis. You can’t, therefore, bank on these banks for jobs and growth. As we see, robust financial growth, it is now often accompanied with slumps and stagnations in the real economy, thus the jobless noninclusive growth resulting in worsening poverty that effectively defied the expectations of Okun’s law. In the US, for instance, while the huge “too big to fail” Wall Street banks were bailed out from collapse owing to the bubble burst of the massive speculative casino gambling-like derivatives and hedge funds now estimated to be over two
Ten billion risks in Greece’s summer of discontent B M G Bloomberg View
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UROPE is gearing up for a summer of discontent. There’s the UK referendum on European Union (EU) membership, a simmering refugee crisis and an increasingly desperate European Central Bank (ECB). Taken together, this list gives reason enough to be fearful about the health of the European project in the coming months. But there is also Greece, which is caught in a spat between Germany and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over debt relief, as it seeks yet more bailout money. Greece—whose economic crisis already threatened to destroy the irrevocable nature of euro membership—still seems to be dragging its feet over state asset sales and pen-
sion reform. It is hemorrhaging cash from its banking system. Athens has to find more than €5 billion ($5.7 billion) to meet its debts in June—and another 5 billion euros in July. That’s €10-billion Greece doesn’t have; not, perhaps, a princely sum for a larger, healthier European state but that’s 20 percent of Greece’s annual tax income. Now, there’s an argument that with so much else going on in the European theater, Brussels will be keen to fudge a solution just to get Greece off the agenda. The IMF may not be so willing to oblige, however. If May comes and goes without a deal—be it because of German intransigence on debt relief, the IMF stubbornness on budget targets, or Greek brinksmanship—Greece and its creditors may run out of time to avoid default. As Greece’s debt repayment dead-
lines approach, EU officials may be busy fighting fires kindled by Britain’s June 23 referendum on EU membership. The outcome of that vote is far from certain. Bloomberg’s composite tracker of opinion polls puts votes to remain in the EU at 39 points, those wanting to leave at 38, with “don’t knows” holding the balance of power at 23. With Prime Minister David Cameron embroiled in a domestic row about his personal taxes in the wake of the so-called Panama Papers, government popularity is likely to take a hit. That can only help the anti-EU campaign; it won’t take many undecided voters to swing the outcome. The European Commission’s regular survey of attitudes to the EU, known as the euro barometer, has already taken a turn for the worse, with the most recent poll showing
That’s 10 billion euros Greece doesn’t have; not, perhaps, a princely sum for a larger, healthier European state but that’s 20 percent of Greece’s annual tax income. Now, there’s an argument that with so much else going on in the European theatre, Brussels will be keen to fudge a solution just to get Greece off the agenda. IMF may not be so willing to oblige, however.
rising discontent: The proportion of Europeans for whom the EU conjures up a negative image has risen to 23 percent (+4); before this, it had declined continu-
Wednesday, April 13, 2016 A11
quadrillion dollars, the small banks that lend directly to small businesses and manufacturers, who create physical wealth and build the real economy, were forced into bankruptcy. From 2007 to 2012 alone, scores of small American banks closed shop. n ‘Simplicity’ way out of poverty? While Okun’s law may have diminished in importance, in an economy of bloating financial monetarism amid the slumping physical real economy, it still remains relevant. More so, because of its “simplicity” not only as a “forecasting tool,” but as a strategic guide of solving the No. 1 problems that are foremost on surveys and on the minds of people—Jobs and Poverty. The battle cry walang mahirap, kung walang kurap (There will be no poverty, if there is no corruption) is sneered at by people, who still feel the pangs of hunger and poverty that are fueling discontent, criminality, unrest, Islamic extremism and leftist insurgency in the countryside. Indeed, there is a direct correlation between social problems and poverty. And two-thirds of those below the poverty line are based in the agriculture and fisheries sector in the countryside. And to simply apply Okun’s law by whoever wins among the presidentiables, he or she must go for the logical strategy, which is invest where the bulk of the unemployed and two-thirds of those below the poverty line are based—in the agriculture and fishery sector, or invest
in the very people who produce our food, but are ironically suffering from hunger and poverty. n Productive, not consumptive, investments. Therefore, the focus must be on providing productive jobs in areas and sectors where poverty is at its worst: fisherfolk, with the sector having the worst poverty incidence; and backward provinces, like Lanao Sur, where poverty is at 68.9 percent; Kalinga-Apayao, 59.8 percent; Eastern Samar, 59.4 percent; Maguindanao, 57.8 percent; Zambo del Norte, 50.3 percent, etc., which incidentally are the areas where insurgency abounds. Let’s not fall into the trap and mistake of hiring people for their consumptive needs similar to the classic Keynesian approach of employing workers to dig up ditches, then hiring another group to fill them up. This is similar to hiring street sweepers (Metro Aides) or elevator boys, or to a certain extent the conditional cash transfer, whereby beneficiaries get cash for their consumptive needs, unlike more productive jobs, which have higher multiplier effects and impact on the economy. Through productive jobs in the countryside, starting with massive rural infrastructure, like irrigation, transport systems, postharvest facilities, credit and capacity-building through Koops, etc., we can easily realize Okun’s law in action. (See my past column on job generation, entitled “Presidentiables must learn from FDR and his story.”)
ously in the four previous surveys. Renewed concern about the European project is just starting to surface in the bond market. Investors are now charging Portugal 3.3 percentage points more for 10-year money than they demand from Germany, a spread that’s well above its six-month average of 2.2 points. Italy’s risk premium rose to 1.3 points last week, up from December’s low of 0.9 points, while Spain is at 1.4 points, up from 1.2 points a month ago. That’s not enough to ring alarm bells; but it’s odd at a time when the ECB is increasing its sovereign bond purchases. While last week’s Dutch rejection of a treaty between the EU and the Ukraine hinged on a very low turnout about a very specific policy, it does hint at the disquiet rumbling through the EU. A British decision
to quit may prompt other countries to hold ballots on their own membership (Marine Le Pen has already promised referendums as part of her campaign strategy for the 2017 French presidential elections). So the timing could turn out to be disastrous. The IMF, which says Greece can’t turn itself around without debt relief, may be unable to reconcile its differences with Germany, which says further relief is irrelevant to a solution. The EU may find itself trying to hand money over to its weakest and most begrudging member just when one of Europe’s most important participants, if the Brexit vote goes against the government, has called it quits. Instead of hitting the beach this summer, Europe’s leaders may find themselves trying to stop their sandcastle from crumbling.
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com.
2nd Front Page BusinessMirror
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Naguiat: It’s Congress’s job to privatize Pagcor
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@davecaga
N response to the apparent need for casinos to be covered by antimoneylaundering laws, the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) is amenable to privatizing its proprietary function of operating casinos. The proposal to privatize Pagcor is meant to prevent the “absurd” situation wherein Pagcor would have to report the transactions covered by the anti-money laundering law, but which transactions Pagcor itself executed as an operator of casinos. That proposal had been pending since the time of President Arroyo, and had only come to the fore again in the heat of the Senate’s investigation into the $81-million cyber heist of the Bangladesh government’s dollar account in New York, the proceeds of which found their way into the Philippines and ended up in the casinos here in Manila. But Pagcor Chairman Cristino Naguiat said the proposed privatization should be done through legislation and not by mere executive order, as he confirmed that there is a recommendation within the Office of the President to privatize Pagcor. “It’s their call whether they want
to amend the law or not,” Naguiat told the BusinessMirror, referring to the senators and congressmen who, he said, would have the discretion on whether to amend Pagcor’s legislative charter.
Policy considerations
PRESIDENTIAL Decree 1869, or Pagcor’s legislative franchise, allows Pagcor to operate its own casinos and enter into joint-venture agreements for the operation of these casinos. This function is seen by senators and congressmen as being incongruent with the intent of the law to make Pagcor as the regulator of gambling in the country, with the ultimate mandate of using the gambling business as a tool for boosting tourism in the country. Pending bills in the Senate and the House feature various amendments to Pagcor’s charter, ranging from mandating Pagcor to only focus on regulating casinos to proposals to strip Pagcor of the
authority to license casino operators altogether, and give that authority back to Congress. During the continuing Senate hearings on money laundering, Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III pointed out that Pagcor’s operation of casinos and the grant of licenses to private casinos result in the situation wherein there is competition between Pagcor and its licensees for the same business. It is also common knowledge that there is a proliferation of e-games outlets even in residential areas, defeating the intent of the law to minimize the adverse effects of gambling on the citizenry and capitalize instead on its potential to boost tourism. In Republic Act 9487, or the law which extended Pagcor’s franchise for another 25 years in 2007, there is also an explicit prohibition by law that “the operation of slot machines and other gambling paraphernalia and equipment, shall not be allowed in establishments open or accessible to the general public.” The only exception to this prohibition is when such slot machines or other gambling paraphernalia or equipment are operated within three-star hotels and resorts accredited by the Department of Tourism and authorized by the corporation and by the local government unit concerned, even as no exception is provided for the operation of these slot
machines in residential areas.
Privatization recommended
AS early as December last year, the Governance Commission on GOCCs (GCG) had already recommended to President Aquino the privatization of Pagcor’s proprietary function of operating casinos, and to focus instead on its function of regulating casinos so that the intent of the laws regarding gambling could be realized. The recommendation to privatize Pagcor was among the 14 recommendations to either close down, privatize or merge government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs) for various reasons, such as redundancy, inefficiency or nonprofitability. Naguiat confirmed that there is, indeed, a pending recommendation at the Office of the President to privatize Pagcor, but he said that he believes that it is not within the GCG’s authority to effect the
privatization of Pagcor. T he GCG ’s lega l basis for recommending the privatization of Pagcor through an executive order by the President is its own charter, which provides that it has the authority, among others, to review the functions of each GOCC and recommend either privatization, abolition and mergers. The GCG’s position is that Pagcor is covered under the supervision of the GCG because its charter had provided it with oversight functions over all GOCCs and government financial institutions, including subsidiaries, except the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, state universities and colleges, cooperatives, local water districts, economic zone authorities and research institutions. “But that’s only their perception [that they can do that]. Anyway, any privatization would probably happen after my stint,” Naguiat said.
It’s their call whether they want to amend the law or not,” Naguiat told the BM, referring to the senators and congressmen who, he said, would have the discretion on whether to amend Pagcor’s legislative charter.
Feeding 1M farmers now a problem due to El Niño El Niño, which started to affect the country in February last year, is expected to last until the second quarter of 2016. It is expected to weaken in the coming months, but the United Nations weather agency earlier warned that its impacts could last for many more months to come. “Despite this, how come government preparation was weak and negligible?” Ofreneo asked.
IPs go hungry
DATA from the Department of Agriculture (DA) showed that Regions 10 and 12 in Mindanao bore the brunt
of El Niño. Farmers in Region 12 have already incurred losses amounting to P2.46 billion, while those in Region 10 lost P737.36 million. Because of the drought, Dr. Domingo M. Non of the Mindanao State University (MSU) said farmers and members of indigenous peoples (IPs) groups are going hungry as they can no longer rely on agriculture. “These people do not have anything to eat. They also have to sacrifice everything else. One story I’ve heard from a student is that her aunt does not take her medicine. They don’t even have the capacity to buy food,” Non said.
In General Santos, South Cotabato, he said the lack of rain and irrigation, and pest infestation have made it impossible for farmers to plant any crop. In particular, Non said the T’boli and B’laan tribes have resorted to other means just to survive. “They have altered their routine activities. Some of them have to go down from the mountains, to beg, or they offer to work for people who can provide them food,” he added. Non-governmental organizations have been giving aid, such as food assistance, to affected farmers, while agribusinesses have offered to hire
them to work in their plantations. Riza Ming, a 31-year-old T’boli teacher in Barangay Maan, in the municipality of T’boli in General Santos, said the IPs resort to cutting small trees and turning them into charcoal to sell. The little they get from the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program also helps tide them over, according to Ming. The serious deprivation suffered by farmers and IPs left them with no alternative but to march in a protest rally in Kidapawan City to pressure the local government to give them rice. Two protesters died, while
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M Prime Holdings Inc., the country’s largest property developer, said it will issue up to P70 billion bonds aimed at individual investors in the next three years to partly fund its P180-billion capital expenditures (capex) through 2018. Jeffrey Lim, SM Prime executive vice president, said the company will apply with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the three-year shelf registration of between P50 billion and P70 billion worth of bonds. The bonds will have a tenor of 10 years or more and will be issued over a three-year period, with the first tranche to be floated in the third quarter of the year, Lim said at the sidelines of the company’s stockholders’ meeting. “The idea is a third of our capex will be funded by the bonds,” Lim said. He said the company has all used up its single borrower’s limit from the banks. SM Prime, known for its chain of malls all over the country, is earmarking some P60 billion in capital expenditures for the next three years starting in 2016. VG Cabuag
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dozens were injured after they were violently dispersed by policemen. (See BM Reports Extra, April 12). Ming called on the government to provide IPs with food subsidy, as they can no longer grow crops on their own. For his part, Ofreneo urged the government to stop dismissing the adverse impact of El Niño on the country’s farm sector. “They should accept reality and admit the gravity of the situation. This is a crisis of unprecedented proportion and the problem with this crisis is, it’s happening gradually but so
Remittance. . . C A
RIDGE OF HIGH PRESSURE AREA EXTENDING OVER LUZON EASTERLIES AFFECTING EASTERN SECTION OF VISYAS AND MINDANAO (APRIL 12, 5:00 PM)
SM Prime to issue P70-billion retail bonds
The BIR chief, however, declined to say how much PhilRem paid in taxes last year due to the confidential nature of BIR records. She also said, upon questioning by the senators, that the acknowledgment receipts issued by PhilRem to its clients “are not legitimate,” as the receipt has to include the company’s tax identification number, the company address, its authority to print invoices, etc. Meanwhile, the registration of remittance firms, money changers and foreign-exchange dealers are contained in BSP Circular 471, series of 2005. This revelation by the BSP comes amid the ongoing Senate hearings on the $81-million stolen from the central bank of Bangladesh via anonymous hackers. The money entered the Philippine banking system via RCBC and converted into pesos by PhilRem. Other government agencies also have no regulatory authority over the operations of remittance firms. “Wala talaga,” Espenilla stressed. “LGUs [local government units] for business permits if you want to count that. But the BSP only stepped forward back in 2005 [to register remittance firms as per BSP Circular 471] because otherwise the Philippines won’t be removed from the FATF [Financial Action Task Force] blacklist,” he explained. The BSP official pointed out that: “Recognizing this limitation, one of our proposed amendments to the BSP
pervasively,” he said. He said the government should provide direct and immediate assistance, such as food and medical aid, to the displaced farmers to help them survive. “They should also modify the cash-transfer scheme to accommodate those who will be displaced. At the same time, there should be an alternative livelihood program,” Ofreneo said. Long-term programs—agrarian, housing and coastal reforms and empowerment programs—should also accompany these efforts, he said.
Charter [RA 7653] is precisely to formally place the remittance business under BSP supervision so we can regulate its activity.” He added that the issue “can also be addressed if the proposed Payments System Act is passed.” Passed on third and final reading by the Lower House in January, the proposed Payments System Act (HB 6197) requires the BSP to define and oversee payment procedures and systems that should be in place to ensure monetary stability. Specifically, the bill provides: “The State shall promote, through the BSP, the safe, efficient, and reliable operation of payment systems in order to control systemic risk and provide an environment conducive to the sustainable growth of the economy.” Under the present setup, based on BSP Circular 471, all forex dealers (FXDs), money changers (MCs) and remittance agents (RAs) are only required to submit to the Anti-Money Laundering Council “a report on covered transactions and suspicious transactions within five banking days from the date of said transaction, or from date the FXDs/MCs and RAs gained information that the transaction was done for the purpose of laundering proceeds of criminal or other illegal activities, or from the time the FXDs/MCs and RAs had reasonably suspected that said transactions were entered into for the purpose of laundering proceeds of criminal and other illegal activities.” Under the AMLA, transactions over P500,000 are covered in the reportorial requirements of banks and other companies involved in financial transactions.