Businessmirror December 12, 2018

DIOKNO ADMITS AUGMENTATION OF P75B, BUT NOT FAVORING KIN

By Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz @joveemarie

M

‘AQUAMAN-ILA’ Jason Momoa, who plays the title character in the Warner Bros.-DC Films spectacle Aquaman, talks to the media at the Southeast Asian press conference for the film held on Tuesday. It was his first time in the Philippines. Aquaman, according to the film’s director James Wan, is one of the rare superhero movies where environmental concerns are in focus.

Manila was the choice venue for the only Southeast Asian media event. Aquaman will be in Philippine theaters everywhere on December 12, ahead of its opening in North America. STEPHANIE TUMAMPOS

DEPT. OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

PHILIPPINE STATISTICS AUTHORITY

2018 BANTOG DATA MEDIA AWARDS CHAMPION

EMBERS of the House of Representatives on Tuesday grilled Budget Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno over 2019 budget insertions, irregularities in infrastructure programs and projects involving his daughter’s in-laws.

During the Question Hour for the DBM secretary, Diokno admitted that there’s an augmentation of P75 billion, and not just P51 billion, in the 2019 national budget.

“We decided to augment another P75 billion [but] you cannot call that insertion

because it’s part of the process,” said Diokno in the course of Majority Leader Rolando Andaya Jr.’s interpellation.

Earlier, Andaya accused Diokno of inserting P51 billion in the budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

Diokno, meanwhile, maintained that there will be no pork barrel in the proposed 2019 national budget by members of the 17th Congress. “The Executive prepares the budget and the President submits the budget to the House and then you can do what you want to do with the budget. [But] you can mangle it, you can approve it,” Diokno said.

See “Diokno,” A2

Susan V. Ople

SCRIBBLES

IN this issue, migrant workers advocate Susan Ople makes a debut with her column “Scribbles.”

The former labor undersecretary heads the Blas F. Ople Policy Center and Training Institute, a nonprofit organization that deals with labor and migration issues. She also represents the OFW sector in the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking or Iacat. In her column, “Toots” Ople discusses the significance of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), the first comprehensive international framework on how to manage people on the move, which 168 UN member-states are signing in Morocco this week. Read her on page A6.

BusinessMirror

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A broader look at today’s business

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Wednesday, December 12, 2018 Vol. 14 No. 63

Oct trade gap at record $4.2B, seen expanding

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By Cai U. Ordinario

@caiordinario

HE country’s trade deficit will continue to widen as the government’s “Build, Build, Build” kicks into high gear next year, according to local economists.

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) on Tuesday disclosed that the country’s trade deficit reached a record high of $4.2 billion in October. In the January-to-October period, the trade gap widened to $33.9

billion this year.

The wider trade deficit was largely due to the 21.4-percent growth in imports worth $10.32 billion in October. In the January-to-October period, imports grew 16.8 percent to $90.985

billion in 2018.

“Trade deficit will continue because of large infra spending, which is import- intensive. My concern is the weak export growth despite a more favorable exchange rate for exports,” Action for Economic Re-

$33.9B The Philippines’s trade gap in the January-to-October 2018 period

form (AER) coordinator Filomeno Sta. Ana III said.

Data showed capital goods imports grew 16.8 percent to $29.667 billion in the January-to-October period. In October, capital goods imports grew 21.2 percent to $3.47 billion in 2018.

This is higher than the cost of fuel imports, which some economists believe was the cause for the increase in the country’s imports for October and, consequently, the trade deficit.

See “Trade gap,” A2

By Rea Cu

HE Philippine insurance industry posted growth of 18 percent in terms of premiums as of end-September 2018, with all the sectors registering increases for the period, the Insurance Commission (IC) said.

The IC reported on Tuesday that the life, nonlife, as well as the mutual benefit association (MBAs) all saw expansions for the period, helping the local insurance industry post total premiums of P218.91 billion by the end of the third quarter, or 18 percent higher than the P185.51 billion in the

same period in 2017.

Insurance Commissioner Dennis B. Funa said the life insurance sector posted premiums of P174.15 billion, which accounts for 79.55 percent of the premiums collected by the industry. This is 20.4 percent higher than the P144.63 billion recorded in 2017.

See “Insurance,” A2

PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 52.7860

BUSINESS NEWS SOURCE OF THE YEAR

PHL still ranked 10th in white paper on digital transformation

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ITH more advanced technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence knocking at the Philippines’s door, the country’s digital transformation remains stagnant, according to a white paper released by the Economist Intelligence United (EIU).

Based on the EIU’s 2018 Asian Digital Transformation Index, the Philippines retained its 10th ranking among the 11 countries included in the index with a score of 12.8. The country only bested Indonesia, which came in last with a score of 12.2.

The leaders in the ranking were Singapore with a score of 78 and Japan with a score of 63.5. Singapore’s ranking remained unchanged while Japan move up a notch. Only South Korea declined in the index and slipped two notches

to 4th overall.

“Fostering digital transformation, however, requires more than deploying new technologies. Asian leaders aspire to create environments in which businesses and other organizations can leverage a range of assets to achieve far-reaching change through digitization.

Comparing their progress is the objective of the Asian Digital Transformation Index,” the report stated.

The EIU index measured digital transformation in terms of three areas—digital infrastructure, human capital and industry connectivity.

Digital infrastructure refers to the reliability, speed and affordability of digital connectivity, as well as other factors that creates a positive environment for digital transformation.

See “Digital,” A8

Balangiga bells finally back, after 117 years

By Rene Acosta

@reneacostaBM

& Recto Mercene @rectomercene

“First-year, single and renewal premiums of variable life insurance products posted doubledigit increases of 20.72 percent, 21.27 percent and 29.52 percent, respectively.”—Funa

@ReaCuBM

2017 EJAP JOURNALISM AWARDS

P25.00 nationwide | 5 sections 24 pages | 7 DAYS A WEEK

Insurance sector sees 18% growth in terms of premiums in 9 mos

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Ople column debuts in BusinessMirror

T UNITED STATES Defense Assistant Secretary Joseph Felter (from left), US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim, Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, Ambassador to the US Jose Manuel Romualdez and Defense Undersecretary for Civil, Veterans and Retiree Affairs Reynaldo Mapagu stand beside the platform bearing the three Balangiga bells at the Villamor Air Base. The simple but stirring handover rites on Tuesday morning capped the bells’ return after 117 years. NONIE REYES

HE three bells taken as booty by American troops in Balangiga, Eastern Samar, during the Filipino-American war more than a century ago were finally returned on Tuesday, further cementing US-Philippine relations, officials said.

The bells, loaded on an American C-130 plane, arrived at Villamor Air Base and were turned over by US officials to Filipinos, led by Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea and Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, in simple but stirring rites.

See “Balangiga bells,” A2

n JAPAN 0.4660 n UK 66.2992 n HK 6.7538 n CHINA 7.6392 n SINGAPORE 38.4066 n AUSTRALIA 37.9267 n EU 59.9438 n SAUDI ARABIA 14.0710

Source: BSP (11 December 2018 )

News

BusinessMirror

A2 Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Local rules for adopting new financial reporting approved

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By Bianca Cuaresma

@BcuaresmaBM

HE Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) announced on Tuesday that it has approved the guidelines on the adoption of new financial reporting standards for trust entities.

In a statement, the Central Bank said the Monetary Board gave a green light to the rules on the implementation of the Philippine Financial Reporting Standards (PFRS) 9-Financial Instruments under management of trust entities (TE).

These guidelines expanded the recently issued Circular 1011, dated August 14, 2018, which

provided an encompassing governance overlay on the adoption of PFRS 9 by BSP Supervised Financial Institutions.

The PFRS 9 is the local adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards 9-Financial Instruments, which was issued by the International Accounting Standards Board.

This replaced the International

Trade gap. . .

Continued from A1

Petroleum crude imports reached $539.03 million in October 2018, representing a 112.8-percent growth from $253.27 million in October 2017.

In the January-to-October period, petroleum crude imports reached $4.16 billion in 2018, a growth of 55.9 percent from $2.67 billion in the same period in 2017.

“I am more interested in medium and long terms.

Infrastructure and removal of uncertainty by resolving fiscal incentive rationalization [which will actually modernize the incentive system] will drive exports. Part of the problem of the current incentives is it awards low-value exports,” Sta. Ana said.

Oil factor

HOWEVER, University of Asia and the Pacific School of Economics Dean Cid Terosa said the projected slowdown in oil prices next year will contribute to slower import growth, and possibly, the narrowing of the trade deficit.

Based on Moody’s Oil and Gas outlook for 2019, oil prices could settle at the $50-$70 per barrel range until 2020. It can be noted that oil prices this year peaked at around $80 per barrel.

“It will be better next year because of weaker oil prices, but we need to be cautious about global trade or market trends that appear to be less rosy,” Terosa said.

Balangiga bells. . .

The bells will be taken to the town of Balangiga on Friday following a two-day“public viewing” at the camp.

“After 117 years, the bells of Balangiga are coming home and will once again take [their] place in the Balangiga Church,” said Lorenzana, who signed the transfer and acceptance certificate from US Ambassador Sung Kim in the full view of Filipino officials.

“There was once a time a time when the bells of Balangiga pealed to a different beat, encompassing a dark and painful episode in history, which nonetheless teaches a lesson that nobody wins in war,” he said, as officials, including Reps. Ben P. Evardone and Raul A. Daza—both lawmakers from Samar—intently listened.

After they were taken by American soldiers, two of the bells were enshrined at the Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming while the other bell was taken to Camp Red Cloud in South Korea. This week, the three bells made a stopover at the Kadena Air Force base in Japan before they took the final voyage to the country.

Insurance. . .

Continued from A1

Broken down, the life insurance sector collected P130.14 billion in premiums from variable life insurance products and P44.02 billion from traditional life insurance products.

“First-year, single and renewal premiums of variable life insurance products posted double-digit increases of 20.72 percent, 21.27 percent and 29.52 percent, respectively,” Funa said.

For the nonlife insurance in-

Accounting Standards 39-Financial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement. PFRS 9 is mandatory and effective beginning January 2019.

The newly issued guidelines set down the specific rules for the classification and measurement, and impairment of financial assets under the administration of trust entities, with particular regard to the uniqueness of trust entities’ operations.

Among the salient points of the guidelines are provisions on the adoption of business models of trust entities, the assignment of business models for each client and the actions to be taken in case of significant unfavorable impact of the new classification of financial assets under management of the trust entities against the performance indicators set for the client.

The guidelines also require the board of directors of a TE to ensure

These threats could further affect the country’s export performance, which peaked at only 3.4 percent this year.

In October, exports growth was at 3.3 percent to $6.11 billion in 2018, from $5.91 billion in the same period in 2017. The country’s total export earnings contracted 1.2 percent in the January-to-October period to $57.07 billion from $57.75 billion in the same period in 2017.

In order to cope, Terosa said the country should continue to boost its efforts to diversify products and market as well as “exploit new and thriving domestic markets.”

Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia, for his part, said implementing agencies can help exporters meet targets by implementing the Philippine Export Development Plan 2018-2022.

Strategies include simplifying regulation, promoting competitiveness of industries, upgrading export quality and standards, facilitating access to financing and promoting innovation. Pernia also emphasized the importance of reforming the Foreign Investment Act to allow foreign investments in domestic market-oriented firms besides export-oriented enterprises.

“This will allow foreign firms to transfer their manufacturing facilities to the Philippines to take advantage of the growing domestic market—including the rising middle class—as well as to serve the Asian regional markets. We expect this move to reduce our imports and current account deficit, ease inflation, and create more and better jobs,” he said.

Continued from A1

Lorenzana said the return of the Balangiga bells symbolizes the two countries’ “shared histories and ideals, new beginnings, renewed friendships and a stronger brotherhood.”

During his speech, Ambassador Kim said the return of the bells underscored the enduring friendship between the two countries along with their shared values and sacrifices.

“Our shared history is enduring and deeply personal. Our relationship has withstood the tests of history and flourishes today. And every day our relationship is further strengthened by our unbreakable alliance, robust economic partnership and deep people-to-people ties,” he said.

“Having now served over two years as US ambassador to the Philippines, I am convinced that our relationship remains ironclad, consecrated by the service and sacrifice of the Americans and Filipinos who fought side by side for freedom,” he said.

Investments. . .

Continued from A8

Despite the decline in FDI inflows in September, BSP data showed that foreign investments attracted by the Philippines in nine months rose by 24.2 percent to $8 billion, from last year’s $6.5 billion.

The BSP said the continuous investment inflows were “buoyed by investor confidence in the Philippine economy on the back of strong macroeconomic fundamentals and high growth prospects.”

In particular, investments in debt instruments reached $5.5 billion during the nine-month period, an increase of 19.6 percent from the $4.6 billion recorded in same period last year.

Net equity capital investments also rose by 52.1 percent to $1.9 billion, from $1.2 billion a year ago.

The bulk of the equity capital placements in January to September emanated from Singapore, Hong Kong, the US, Japan and China. These investments were channeled largely to manufacturing, financial and insurance, real estate, arts, entertainment and recreation, and electricity, gas, steam and air-conditioning supply activities.

Reinvestment of earnings during the period amounted to $614 million.

The government’s goal is to attract $9.2 billion in net inflows this year. To hit this target, total FDI in October to December must average at least $1.2 billion.

the start of the healing process.

“We also appreciate the very wise gesture of the US Government in finally bringing back the bells of Balangiga to where they should belong,” CBCP President Romulo G. Valles said.

Valles said the“priceless religious treasures” will help foster “deeper sense of justice and respect” between Filipinos and Americans.

In 1957, the Philippines submitted its first petition to the US government for the return of the bells. The effort, together with the two more other attempts of the Philippine government in 1989 and 1994 to bring back the bells, failed.

It was only in 2017 when the US government finally agreed to return the bells after such was demanded by President Duterte.

“We thank in particular our present government, with the leadership of President Rodrigo R. Duterte, for bringing a most successful and happy conclusion to all these efforts,” Valles said.

‘Watershed’

THE Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) said the bells’return marked

MALACAÑANG said the return of the Balangiga bells on Philippine soil marks a “watershed in the nation’s history” as it hoped that the historic event will be a constant reminder of the people’s gallantry, heroism and strong

dustry, the net premiums also increased by 7.34 percent to P36.83 billion compared to the P34.31 billion as of end September 2017.

Consistent with the trend in past reporting periods, the motor car insurance business comprised more than half of the total net premiums written with a 51.39-percent share, followed by fire insurance business with 13 percent and accident insurance business with a 9.87-percent share.

The reported contributions or premiums of MBAs rose to P7.93 billion, up by 21.20 percent from P6.54 billion during the same pe-

riod last year, as three MBA companies posted significant increases in their contributions accounting for 77.09 percent of the total, according to Funa.

Total assets of the insurance industry further rose to P1.55 trillion as of the end of third quarter this year, from P1.54 trillion during the same period in 2017.

“The insurance density, which was P1,768.49 as of end of September last year, has increased by 16.12 percent to P2,053.58 per capita. Insurance penetration likewise increased by 0.12 percentage points to 1.76 percent as of the end

Bishops’ statement

appropriate and consistent adoption of the PFRS 9 as part of its reporting governance process and the approval of relevant policies and guidelines on the classification and measurement of financial assets under management.

The BSP also said trust entities should now define business models to be adopted for managing the financial assets of clients under its administration based on predefined investment objectives. The classification of financial assets for each client shall be aligned with the business models to be determined by the trust entities.

In October, Moody’s Investors Services lauded the BSP for its implementation of the PFRS 9 for banks, saying local financial institutions have benefited from the adoption of the international standard.

sense of national pride.

The Palace also expressed its gratitude to all stakeholders from both the Philippines and the United States who worked tirelessly and selflessly for the return of the bells.

“This unprecedented gesture is well appreciated and will surely forge a stronger and more enduring relationship between the two long-time allies and friends as we finally close a tragic chapter in the two countries’ shared history,” Presidential Spokesman and Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador S. Panelo said in a statement on Tuesday.“ It was the President himself who demanded the return of the Balangiga bells to the Philippines during his second State of the Nation Address last year. However, he skipped the handover of the Balangiga bells at the Villamor Air Base on Tuesday.

No reason was provided yet on the sudden change of plans, but Malacañang said the President’s absence in the event was upon the recommendation of Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana. Moreover, Panelo earlier said that the President will instead be in Samar on Saturday to turnover the bells to Balangiga officials. With Bernadette D. Nicolas and Samuel P. Medenilla

of third quarter this year, from 1.64 percent during the same period last year.” he added.

Insurance density is defined as the ratio of premium to the total population. Insurance penetration, on the other hand, is measured as the ratio of premiums to the country’s gross domestic product.

“The life insurance coverage provided by private insurers likewise rose from 45.69 percent as of end September 2017 to 56.63 percent during the same period this year, which is equivalent to an increase of 10.94 percentage points,” he said.

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Ombudsman must probe pork in 2019 natl budget–Lacson

By Butch Fernandez

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@butchfBM

EN. Panfilo M. Lacson Sr., citing recent reports on multimillion-peso pork barrel funds tucked in the P3.757-trillion national budget bill for 2019, on Tuesday prodded the Office of the Ombudsman to conduct its own investigation.

“It may be time for new Ombudsman Samuel Martires to step into the picture,” Lacson said.

The senator said he was grateful to “an unlikely ally”—referring to House Majority Leader Rolando G. Andaya Jr., with whom he had a word war—for revealing that a single contractor hogged no less than 30 flood-control projects worth billions of pesos, suggesting that both the House of Representatives and the Office of the Ombudsman can “conduct their own probes into the revelations.”

In a post on his Twitter account, Lacson said: “Expose pa more! A single contractor bagging 30 flood control projects worth billions of pesos calls for a congressional inquiry/Ombudsman investigation.

Thank God I found an unlikely ‘ally’ in Cong. Andaya,” referring to the majority leader.

In a privilege speech on Monday, Andaya divulged a single proprietorship based in Bulacan cornered the flood-control projects in provinces, including Sorsogon and Catanduanes.

Earlier, Lacson himself disclosed on December 5 that “a congressman

Diokno. . .

Continued from A1

The delayed approval of the national budget stemmed from the supposed P51-billion insertions allegedly by the previous House leadership, prompting the leadership to realign the money to other projects and for equitable and fair distribution of funds.

The alleged insertions were already realigned to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Fund for the rehabilitation of areas badly hit by typhoon Ompong, especially Cagayan Valley, Health Facilities Enhancement Program of the Department of Health, DOH’s Health Human Resources Development “to stave off the mass layoff of 6,000 nurses, and doctors and dentists, as well,” and Capital Outlay of State Universities and Colleges.

The funds were also realigned to Technical-Vocational Laboratories under the Department of Education; to decongest traffic in urban areas; for roads for identified tourism areas; for roads to trade areas, economic zones, livelihood centers and markets; and for the Department of Agriculture’s farm-to-market roads.

A lso dur ing t he Quest ion Hour, Minority Leader Danilo E. Su a re z quest ioned D iok no’s knowledge over P2.8-billion projects in Casiguran and Sorsogon where his daughter’s in-laws are elected officials.

Suarez revealed that Diokno’s daughter is married to the son of Sorsogon Vice Gov. Ester Hamor and Casiguran Mayor Edwin Hamor, who are both running in the 2019 elections.

However, Diokno said he’s not aware of the project, and as family, they “do not talk about projects.”

He said none of his family members as well as friends are involved whenever he makes decisions as budget secretary.

“I have served three presidents.

I am known for my integrity. I have no relatives nor friends as far as public affairs are concerned,” he said.

got at least P1.9 billion in congressional insertions, while a congresswoman got P2.4 billion.”

The senator’s earlier exposé cited figures from “the General Appropriations Bill 2—the House version of the national budget bill—showing P2.4 billion worth of projects are in Pampanga’s second district, while P1.9 billion in projects are in Camarines Sur.” “These amounts are aside from the P60 million each House member got for his or her pet projects,” Lacson pointed out, even as he did not identify the recipients by name.

Andaya represents the first district of Camarines Sur, while Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo represents the second district of Pampanga.

Recalling Andaya saying this could be a case of “misplaced generosity,” Lacson suggested the lawmakers concerned can “show good faith by declining such amounts.”

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Lacson affirmed his determination to continue his crusade against pork even if he has to go it alone, having waged a “mostly lonely battle” against the pork barrel system since delivering a privilege speech detailing its evils in 2003.

Lacson added that even before the Supreme Court outlawed pork in 2013, he also declined his P200million-a-year pork allocation, making sure he has the last amendment in the budget law—to return the amount to the National Treasury.

He vowed to “continue this lonely crusade against the pork barrel even alone, as I have always been doing.”

“That’s part of my job to allocate resources per department, but to implement, that’s not my job....

There are no friends, no relatives when I make a decision. [It is] unbiased,” added Diokno.

In other infrastructure issues, Diokno said he is not aware of the controversial CT Leoncio Trading and Construction, which was involved in the so-called “large-scale scam” worth billions of pesos in infrastructure spending under 2018’s appropriations.

Contractor summoned

MEANWHILE, the plenary approved the motion of Majority Leader Rolando G. Andaya Jr. to issue a subpoena against a certain Consolacion T. Leoncio, sole proprietor of CT Leoncio Trading and Construction, that allegedly bagged several infrastructure contracts in various provinces.

“The favored contractor of a DBM official bagged billions of pesos worth of DPWH projects not only in Sorsogon and Catanduanes, but also multimillion projects of other government agencies in Metro Manila and other provinces in almost all parts of the country,” he said.

“We have received official records showing that billions of pesos in public funds were funneled from DBM to CT Leoncio Construction and Trading in official transactions of unparalleled proportion,” he added.

He said these projects are located in Sorsogon, Catanduanes, Samar, National Capital Region, Camarines Sur, Pangasinan, Tarlac, Batangas, Bulacan and Davao City.

Besides DPWH projects, CT Leoncio also cornered various infrastructure contracts from the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Department of Transportation, Philippine Ports Authority, Philippine Fisheries Development Authority, and the Department of Labor and Employment, Andaya said.

“In furtherance of the investigation being conducted by your Rules Committee, I move that we issue a subpoena for Consolacion T. Leoncio, proprietor of CT Leoncio Trading and Construction,” Andaya said.

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Garin vs Ubial: DOJ wraps up Dengvaxia vaccine probe

By Joel R. San Juan

@jrsanjuan1573

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HE Department of Justice (DOJ) has wrapped up its preliminary investigation into the complaint lodged by former Health Secretary Janette Garin against her successor, former Health Secretary Paulyn Jean Ubial, whom the former blamed for alleged deaths of several children due to Dengvaxia vaccine.

Assistant State Prosecutor Claire Eufracia Pagayanan said the case filed by Garin is now considered submitted for resolution following last Monday’s hearing.

During the last hearing, Ubial filed her rejoinder denying the allegations made

by Garin.

In her complaint-affidavit, Garin accused Ubial of reckless imprudence resulting in homicide under Article 365 of the Revised Penal Code.

She said Ubial’s decision to shift the dengue immunization program from being school-based to a communitybased program contributed to the alleged reported deaths of the immunized children.

Garin claimed that U bial a lso relaxed the protocol on securing prior consent by authorizing immunization on an “implied consent” basis.

The former health secretary noted that the Department of Health (DOH) implemented a school-based dengue immunization program during her term, but when Ubial took over, there was a “reckless” decision to have it expanded into a community-based program, which may have caused the reported deaths.

“From the forgoing, it is clear that Secretary Ubial’s reckless implementation of the community-based dengue immunization program was the

only possible cause of the reported deaths,” Garin said in her complaint.

“Deaths were reported soon after the implementation of Sec. Ubial’s Community-based dengue immunization program. It must be emphasized that the deaths started during Secretary Ubial’s term as DOH Secretary and afterwards,” she added.

Garin said the DOH under her term preferred the school-based dengue immunization program “because the physical and organizational structure of such a program is already in place considering that Dengvaxia is already the sixth vaccine introduced in schools.”

“School-based vaccination, likewise, avoids politicizing immunization. In my experience community based vaccination is more prone to abuse as it can be accessed by people who can actually afford the vaccine but unjustifiably avails of the free vaccines from the health centers,” she added.

Despite this, Garin claimed Ubial allowed the community-based dengue immunization program to continue for more than a year, issued Philippine National Drug Formulary exemptions, expanded the program to Region 7, expanded it to cover the members of the Philippine National Police and issued orders to implement it to three more regions.

She added that Ubial continued the vaccination program and expanded it, giving the second and third doses to the first 400,000 plus students who received the vaccine during the Aquino administration.

Garin herself is facing a string of criminal charges before the DOJ also in connection with the deaths of several schoolchildren allegedly due to the antidengue vaccine.

DILG chief says Red’s holiday truce declaration meaningless, propaganda

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NTERIOR Secretary Eduardo M. Año on Tuesday dismissed the reported unilateral cease-fire declaration of the Communist Party of the Philippines as meaningless and nothing but a propaganda gimmick.

“This is baloney. They [the communists] should not use Christmas in their pretense for a cease-fire because we know they are [merely bent] to strengthen their forces,” Año said in a news statement issued on Tuesday.

Echoing the stand issued earlier by the defense department, Año said the Department of the Interior and Local Government is not recommending a holiday truce because the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF) will only exploit the truce to consolidate its forces to celebrate its 50th founding anniversary.

“Every year, they declare a cease-fire and the government gives way in the spirit of Christmas. At this juncture, we will not join the ride,” the former Armed

Forces chief of staff said.

Año also warned that the CPP-NPA might attack government troops to highlight its forthcoming 50th anniversary commemoration.

“We will not allow ourselves to fall into the same trap again. We have seen time and again the insincerity of the communists and their front organizations,” he said.

The CPP Central Committee announced last Friday a temporary cease-fire to take effect at 12:01 a.m. on December 24 to 11:59 p.m. on December 26, and at 12:01 a.m. on December 31 to 11:59 of January 1, 2019.

Año said nothing will come out of a truce because the CPP-NPA-NDF has really no intention to stop fighting with government forces during a cease-fire.

“Don’t just talk. If they are sincere in having peace, President Duterte has long ago asked [CPP chairman]Joma Sison to return and talk to him face-to-face,” Año said. Jonathan L. Mayuga

DPWH seeks ₧2-billion funding for Tacloban-Palo diversion road

By Lorenz S. Marasigan @lorenzmarasigan

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HE Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) is trying to secure some P2 billion to complete the construction of the Tacloban-Palo Diversion Road to decongest traffic and curb flooding in Tacloban and Leyte.

Under the proposal, the department intends to build a 2.87-kilometer, four-lane road that will start from San Jose-Candahug Road in Tacloban City to Maharlika Highway in Barangay Campetic, Palo, Leyte, traversing the village of Pawing.

According to DPWH Region 8 Director Nerie D. Bueno, the road is designed to not only decongest vehicular traffic along the Maharlika Highway, but will also lessen flooding in the area.

“We have included Tacloban-Palo Diversion Road Project in our 2019 proposed budget. We hope to commence the road project soon as it is among our priority projects that will serve as an alternate route to relieve traf-

fic congestion at the junction of Maharlika Highway, Tacloban-Baybay South Road, and Government Center Road,” Bueno said.

She added that the road will mainly “protect lives and properties of residents living in flood-prone barangays of Palo and Tacloban City with its flood-control component composed of a 6-meter-wide drainage and a double-barrel cross drainage in every 50 meters.”

Bueno explained that the proposed bigger drainage system will mitigate flooding in the barangays of Candahug, Pawing and Campetic in Palo, Leyte; and barangays Caibaan, San Jose, Marasbaras, Manlurip, as well as V&G and Imelda Subdivisions in Tacloban City, “which normally turn into swamp lands during rainy and typhoon season and take weeks for floodwater to subside.”

The project also includes the provision for bike lanes, sidewalks, service roads, solar street lights and road-safety device components, converting the idle, floodprone lands to prime commercial districts of the province.

Editor: Vittorio V. Vitug • Wednesday, December 12, 2018 A3

Joint congressional session to resolve Mindanao martial-law extension today

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By Jovee Marie N. Dela Cruz @joveemarie & Jonathan L. Mayuga @jonlmayuga

HE Senate and the House of Representatives are expected to hold a joint session today (Wednesday) to deliberate and pass a resolution calling for a oneyear extension of martial law and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Mindanao.

After a briefing with government security officials, Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said martial law should be extended as needed in Mindanao.

“As long it takes [martial law should be implemented]. I will vote for it,” she said.

Arroyo, likewise, guaranteed the approval by the lower chamber of the House Concurrent Resolution 24 extending martial law in the southern part of the country.

The joint session of Congress will be held at 9 a.m. today at the Batasang Pambansa.

LGU support

THE yearlong extension of martial law in Mindanao is supported by local government units (LGUs), an official of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) said on Tuesday.

Local Government Assistant Secretary and Spokesman Jonathan Malaya said that all local government units in Mindanao, including the umbrella organization of all LGUs, the Union of Local Authorities in the Philippines (Ulap), have all expressed their support for the extension of martial law.

“In fact, we have not heard of any local chief executive in Mindanao who oppose the extension of martial law,” Malaya said in a

news statement issued on Tuesday.

“According to our elected local government officials, martial law in Mindanao has led to improved peace and order in their areas. Who are we to argue against that?” Malaya said.

The extension of martial law, he added, is also timely with the forthcoming midterm elections.

“The extension will ensure an improved security climate, especially in election hot spots,” he said.

The official issued the statement, even as the Philippine Councilors League (PCL), the largest organization of local government officials in the country, passed a resolution in support of the extension of martial law.

“We had a meeting with the officials of Ulap, led by Albay Gov. Al Francis Bichara and he said that they are 100 percent behind the recommendation of Secretary Eduardo M. Año on this matter,” Malaya said.

PCL National Chairman Danilo Dayanghirang said the people of Mindanao are “at peace” with the implementation of martial law, which is why declaring support for its third extension in Mindanao is easy.

Dayanghirang, who is also Davao City councilor, said the implementation of martial law

in Mindanao has paved the way to various developments in the island and points to the entities opposing its extension as “insignificant minority who are just plain detractors of the current administration.

‘Deterrent’

PRESIDENT Duterte first ordered martial law in Mindanao on May 23, 2017, after local terrorists laid siege on Marawi City.

He asked for a five-month extension that lasted until December 31, 2017, after the 60-day declaration lapsed in July. A second extension was granted by Congress to extend the period of martial law until December 31, 2018.

In a four-page letter dated December 6, Malacañang, through Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, wrote a letter to Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto III and Speaker Arroyo to extend for the third time the military rule in Mindanao from December 31, 2018 to December 31, 2019.

According to Medialdea, the declaration of martial law in Mindanao has resulted in the “reduction of the capabilities of different terrorist groups, particularly the neutralization of 685 members of the local terrorist groups and 1,073 members of the communist terror group; dismantling of seven guerrilla fronts and weakening of 19 others; surrender of unprecedented number of loose firearms,” among others.

“For all the foregoing reasons, I implore the Congress of the Philippines to further extend the proclamation of martial law and the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in the whole of Mindanao for a period of one [1] year, from 01 January 2019 to 31 December 2019, or for such other period of time as the Congress may determine, in accordance with Section 18, Article VII of the 1987 Philippine Constitution,” said Medialdea.

A4 Wednesday, December 12, 2018 • Editor: Vittorio V. Vitug

Economy BusinessMirror

PhilMaize slams retention of ‘no export’ rule on local corn produce

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By Jasper Emmanuel Y. Arcalas

@jearcalas

HE absence of a provision under the rice tariffication bill that will allow the export of corn has angered farmers belonging to the Philippine Maize Federation Inc. (PhilMaize), saying they had lost the chance of having an alternative market for their produce.

PhilMaize President Roger V. Navarro said they “vehemently” oppose the seeming deliberate omission of the provision but admitted that they can only do so much as the bicameral conference committee-approved rice tariffication bill is nearing its passage into law.

“It is to our frustration that, for so long a time, the corn farmers want to export and until today we are not given the chance. It was taken out from the tariffication [bill],” Navarro told the BusinessMirror.

“It is truly unfair that they are

liberalizing our rice [sector] but still they are [imposing] restrictions [on] corn until this time. That’s very unfair to us,” he lamented.

Under House Bill 7735, a specific provision was included directing the National Food Authority (NFA) to establish rules and regulations governing the export of rice and corn.

The provision was supported

by PhilMaize, the NFA, and even by the Department of Agriculture (DA) under Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol.

However, the provision was not

adopted by the bicam as it opted to use Senate Bill (SB) 1998 as the working draft of the rice tariffication bill that would remove the quantitative restriction (QR) on the staple.

The bicam-approved rice tariffication bill only carried SB 1998’s provision lifting the quantitative export restrictions on rice and did not contain any language or provision allowing the export of corn.

“It was included in the House version and the [agriculture] secretary has also acknowledge that and he concurred,” he said. “The problem is that the Senate railroaded the bill and the provision was not included.”

As early as January 2017, Piñol has been keen on allowing corn farmers to tap the export market to regulate local farm-gate prices in times of oversupply. However, an amendment to the NFA charter is needed in order for farmers to export corn.

Neda signs climate-change declaration, affirms vow for green transport drive

Under the present NFA charter, corn farmers are only allowed to export corn when the NFA Council certifies that there is an oversupply in the local market.

Navarro earlier explained that allowing the export of corn would also boost local farm-gate prices. “The ability to export would be considered by traders in setting farm-gate price,” he said.

Furthermore, Navarro said, they are worried over the future of the NFA’s corn procurement program once the QR on rice imports is lifted.

Navarro explained that it is now unclear on who would buy corn from local farmers when farm-gate prices depress in times of oversupply.

“That has been part of the mandate of the NFA. The problem now is it seems that they changed its mandate,” he said.

It is truly unfair that they are liberalizing our rice [sector] but still they are [imposing] restrictions [on] corn until this time. That’s very unfair to us.”—Navarro

Study urges govt anew to boost employment generation

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F the government fails to increase job generation, the dream of most Filipinos of attaining the quintessential American middle-class lifestyle won’t be realized even in the next 22 years, according to the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS).

In a study titled Profile and Determinants of the Middle-Income Class in the Philippines, PIDS Senior Research Fellow Jose Ramon G. Albert and researchers Angelo Gabrielle F. Santos and Jana Flor V. Vizmanos said jobs have been regarded as one of the top five national issues for low-income Filipinos under the Aquino and Duterte administrations according to surveys undertaken by Pulse Asia.

Albert said attaining the goals of AmBisyon 2040, which was crafted in 2015, showed that some 79.2 percent of Filipinos just want a simple and comfortable life, but will not be achieve such without jobs.

“Government needs to continue human capital investments in basic education, especially for the poor, and veer away from wasteful spending that have potential distortions in equity (free college education) and increase investments in social programs that are well targeted and functional,” Albert told the BusinessMirror on Tuesday.

“Simulations show that at the current income growth of the bottom 40 percent, it is unlikely for the poor to transition into middle class by 2040. However, it is not impossible to achieve the envisioned transition of the poor only if the country’s impressive economic growth benefits

everyone across the income distribution,” the research stated.

The authors explained that middle income households live in urban areas, have members who are of working age and employed in stable jobs, especially for the poor. They also place a high value on investing on human capital.

However, they are faced with a number of challenges that make them vulnerable in falling back into poverty. These include the fact that a large proportion of these Filipinos are supported by Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs).

This makes them vulnerable, the authors said, because OFWs face “end of contract” terms. When this happens, some of these households may fall back into poverty, especially when there are insufficient social protection mechanisms for them.

The authors also said middle income households are vulnerable to health concerns via water-borne diseases. They said many middle income class Filipinos have good access to quality water but some may be living in disadvantaged areas.

By living in these areas, the authors said, middle income households still rely on ground and surface water that are prone to contamination such as microbes and chemicals.

Data showed around 37.2 percent of middle income households’ access to safe water is from other sources apart from own use, faucet, and community water systems.

Further, the authors said, while 74 percent of middle income households live in their own houses, some 23 percent are renters and three

percent are informal settlers or prefer to reside in houses or lots without consent.

In Metro Manila alone, a large fraction rent houses at 35 percent and live as informal settlers at seven percent. Some 58 percent live in their own houses.

“In contrast to the conventional view of associating the informal settlers with the urban poor, the data show that informal settlers in urbanized areas belong to the middleincome class. In Metro Manila, for instance, 69 percent of the informal settlers belong to the middle-income class,” the study stated.

Meanwhile, members of the middle income class also raise problems for the government. The first reason is their contribution to urban congestion, particularly in Metro Manila.

Based on 2015 data, the authors said 12 percent of middle class families own at least one vehicle.

In urban areas, close to 13 percent of middle income households own at least one car.

Nationwide, around seven out of 10 cars are owned by the middle-income households. In Metro Manila, six out of 10 cars are owned by middle income families.

“In the case of the middle-income’s growing contribution to traffic congestion, the government should fast-track the improvement of public transport services in order to attract the middle-income into using public transport instead of using cars,” the study stated.

“At the same time, this will largely benefit the low-income who have even stronger dependence of public transport services as they are un-

likely to use private modes for their own mobility,” it added.

Based on the Policy Note in 2015, the PIDS said country’s middle class consists of those with annual per capita incomes in 2012 ranging from about P64,317 to P787,572. These comprise some 42.19 million households.

The authors divided the middle class into seven income classes.

Those earning less than P7,890 per month are considered poor middle class members and they comprise 4.2 million households.

The authors said those earning between P7,890 and P15,780 per month are considered low income (but not poor) middle class members while those earnings P15,780 to P31,560 a month comprise the lower middle income class.

There are about 7.1 million households that are considered low income and 5.8 million are considered lower middle income.

The middle-income class earns between P31,560 to P78,900 per month while the upper middle income earns P78,900 to P118,350 per month.

There are around 3.6 million households considered middle-income class and 470,000 households classified as upper middle income.

The upper crust of the Philippine middle class is composed of the upper income (but not rich) and the rich which earn P118,350 to P157,800 and at least P157,800 a month, respectively.

There are around 170,000 households classified as upper income (but not rich) and 150,000 households considered rich middle class members. Cai U. Ordinario

POEA issues caution to Malta jobseekers

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HE Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) cautioned Filipinos who are looking to apply for work in Malta against unscrupulous individuals offering jobs in the said country.

In POEA Advisory 53-2018 dated November 22 and released on Tuesday, the agency revealed that several schemes are being used by illegal recruiters in sending overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) to Malta, including unauthorized

recruitment, third country hiring, contract substitution and excessive placement fees.

“All Filipinos who are seeking employment opportunities in Malta are reminded to exercise caution and avoid recruitment schemes by unscrupulous individuals and entities, who are undermining both Maltese and Philippine laws to exact money from their victims,” the POEA said.

The agency advised would-be OFWs to seek employment only through government-licensed Philippine Recruitment Agencies (PRAs).

“All are hereby advised to transact only with duly licensed PRA with valid and approved jobs orders. This can be verified through the POEA web site at www.poea.gov.ph, or contact the 24/7 POEA Hotline at 722-11-44 or 72211-55 for a quick verification of any overseas employment offer/s,” it said. PNA

www.businessmirror.com.ph

By Cai U. Ordinario @caiordinario

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HE National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) will explore alternative transport options and other green initiatives following the signing of the agency’s climate-change declaration.

In a news statement issued on Tuesday, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia said the declaration provides that the Neda commits to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions requiring the oversight agency to use ride sharing or point-to-point shuttles for employees, among others.

The Neda Declaration on Climate Change, likewise, reaffirmed the agency’s commitment to conserve the environment and natural resources.

“This declaration is a call to action for the present generation to live sustainably and help reduce the detrimental effects of climate change, so as not to jeopardize the needs of future generations,” Pernia said.

“It will also provide the muchneeded framework that will guide and enable Neda to implement concrete actions that ensure the protection and conservation of our environment and natural resources,” he added.

The Neda Climate Change Strategy is a multicomponent initiative aimed at implementing measures that reduce the agency’s ecological footprint and energy and water consumption, as well as reduce per-

capita greenhouse-gas emissions, while maximizing productivity.

The first component is the dissemination of a promotional video on climate change, and the signing and adoption of the Neda Declaration on Climate Change.

The second component involves mainstreaming sustainable consumption practices in the workplace like water and energy conservation, efficient use of resources, reducing the use of plastic, waste reduction and recycling, and workplace greening through rooftop or vertical gardening.

The last component is the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework that assesses the overall effectiveness of the Neda’s green initiatives, which could include a reward system that incentivizes good practices.

“With this initiative, we hope to set an example among our stakeholders and encourage other government agencies to follow suit. Together, we can all make a big impact in reducing the effects of climate change,” Pernia said.

The creation of the strategy stemmed from the Philippines’s signing of the Paris Agreement on March 23, 2017, as well as Republic Act 9729 or the Climate Change Act of 2009.

The Neda also took into consideration the country’s scientific studies which find that the Philippines is one of the countries in the world most vulnerable to climate change.

Resurgent BPO still to drive office space demand in 2019

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FTER seeing a few years of decline, the business-process outsourcing (BPO) industry is expected to come back with a vengeance in 2019, so much so that it is expected to become a major driving force in office take-up next year, according to Leechiu Property Consultants (LPC).

LPC Chief Executive Officer David Leechiu said many big brands from the United States have committed to tens of thousands of jobs in the Philippines in the next 18 months.

“They gonna set up office [here].

They are gonna hire people like crazy and be operational within the next nine to 18 months, and these are big facilities,” he said in an interview on Monday.

Leechiu said the BPO take-up in Metro Manila has been continuously declining from 485,000 square meters in 2016 to 289,819 sq m this year.

“They have diversified out of the Philippines in 2017 and 2018, and now that they have done that, they [are] going to come back here.

The rapidly rising cost of labor in the US because of the record unemployment is going to drive, force companies to come back to the Philippines,” he said.

To facilitate the expansion of the BPO industry, Leechiu said the government needs to promote

more Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) zones, boost investment in education and retooling of people, and compromise on tax incentives.

“Why let these opportunities pass,” he said, referring to the need to sustain the interest of these BPO players in the country, including Metro Manila.

Apart from the BPO sector, Leechiu said demand for office space next year will also come from Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators and multinational companies, albeit slowly.

Meanwhile, LPC reported that demand for office space in the Philippines reached a record high of 1.5 million sq m as of December 2018, with Metro Manila accounting for 74 percent.

Demand in the Metro Manila grew from 910,000 sq m in 2017 to 1.16 million sq m by December 2018, posting a growth of 27 percent. The figure included precommitments by BPO tenants competing for scarce Peza-accredited spaces to be completed in 2019 in the capital.

Outside of Metro Manila, Clark Global City registered the highest office demand at 156,000 sq m.

Cebu and Laguna followed posting 133,000 sq m and 46,000 sq m., respectively. Davao City took fourth place generating 28,000 sq m. PNA

Duterte sets aside career service eligibility for Palace appointees

By Bernadette D. Nicolas @BNicolasBM

P

RESIDENT Duterte on Tuesday said that career executive service eligibility is not a primordial consideration among current and prospective government appointees under his administration, saying he is inclined to give more weight on individual honesty and competence. “…You are competent and you are honest, period…[I don’t give much weight on eligibility]...if you want to work during my term. [If] you are competent and you are honest, period.

There will be no eligibility [requirement],” he said in mix of Tagalog and English in a speech

at the initial awarding of 500 housing units at the Scout Ranger Ville in San Miguel, Bulacan.

Duterte also reiterated his frustration in combatting corruption in the government.

“But the problem is [that] along the way, there is corruption in the government down to the local level. So if we will not be able to end this, people will only get so much,” he said.

Duterte has also repeatedly said in his speeches that it only takes “a whiff of corruption” for him to fire officials, but the President has also been criticized for reappointing sacked government officials. He also has the penchant of appointing retired military officials in government posts, saying that these officials follow his orders diligently.

The World BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Oil holds drop on doubts over Opec output cut

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IL held its biggest loss in two weeks as uncertainty over how the Opec+ coalition will implement its output cuts and the prospect of surging US supplies kept investors wary.

Futures in New York were little changed, after Monday’s 3.1 percent drop erased gains following last week’s pact between Saudi Arabia, Russia and other major producers to curb output. While the group’s cuts will initially reduce inventories and drive prices up, that can spark production in the US, according to Citigroup Inc. Meanwhile, American oil explorers are already making plans to boost their spending in 2019.

Crude has slumped about 30 percent from a four-year high in early October, with volatility reaching the highest level in more than two years last month. While analysts from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to Morgan Stanley are optimistic the Opec+ curbs will bring some relief to the market, they raised concerns over the effectiveness of the pact in the longer term.

Meanwhile, China’s vice premier discussed a timetable and road map on trade talks with his US counterpart.

“Opec+ cuts alone may not have been enough to completely convince investors,” said Sungchil Will Yun, a senior commodities analyst at HI Investment & Futures Corp., by phone from Seoul. “We’re seeing volatility for now and there are some global uncertainties ahead of us such as trade tensions that may suppress demand coupled with potential American supply increase, both bearish for prices.”

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for January delivery was at $51.12 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 12 cents, at 1:02 p.m. in Singapore.

Prices dropped 3.1 percent to $51 on Monday, the biggest loss since November 23. Total volume traded was 9 percent above the 100-day average.

Brent for February settlement increased 15 cents to $60.12 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures Europe exchange.

Futures settled 2.8 percent lower at $59.97 on Monday.

The global benchmark crude traded at $8.81 a barrel above WTI for the same month.

The oil market will need repeated output cuts from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies to offset growing American crude production as the group’s pledged reduction of 1.2 million barrels a day is “really a significant number” that will support prices, Citigroup’s global head of commodities research, Ed Morse, said in a video posted on its web site.

“Oil hits $70-$75 a barrel and US production starts soaring, and US exports start soaring again, and the countries involved in production cuts have to meet again to rein in production,” he said.

Meanwhile, American oil drillers including Hess Corp. are planning a spending hike next year, while ConocoPhillips pledged to maintain its 2018 level, the companies said in separate statements on Monday.

Crude explorers globally are estimated to increase spending by 8 percent to $484 billion in 2019, led by supermajors, according to Evercore ISI. Bloomberg News

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

A5

China vice premier discusses plans for trade talks with US officials

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EIJING—China’s economy czar and US trade envoys discussed plans for talks on a tariff battle, the government said on Tuesday, indicating negotiations are going ahead despite tension over the arrest of a Chinese tech executive.

V ice P re m ie r L iu He t a l k e d b y p ho n e w it h Tr e a s u r y S e c r e t a r y St e v e n M nu c h i n a n d

U S Tr a d e R e p. R o b e r t L i g ht h i z er about “t he promot ion of t h e n e x t e c o no m i c a n d t r a d e

c o n s u lt at i o n s ,” s a i d a s ho r t Commerce Ministr y statement. It gave no ot her det a i l s.

The announcement indicated talks are on track despite China’s weekend threats of unspecified “grave consequences” if the Huawei Technologies Ltd. executive isn’t released. She was arrested in Canada on US charges of possible violations of trade sanctions on Iran.

President Donald J. Trump agreed on December 1 to postpone more US tariff hikes on Chinese imports for 90 days while the two sides negotiate over Ameri-

Taiwan planning to extend ban on Huawei network equipment

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AIPEI, Taiwan—Taiwan is mulling over an expansion of its five-yearold ban on network equipment produced by Chinese companies Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp. amid security concerns. Officials sought over the weekend to reassure lawmakers and the public that such measures have been effective and the threat to the communications sector is minimal.

On Monday, legislators called for extending the ban on Huawei to the financial industry, where it has reportedly sought business providing digital finance services.

Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman Wellington Koo was quoted by local media as saying the government would consider such a move based on provisions under Taiwanese law and World Trade Organization rules.

“Most Taiwanese banks use components made by IBM in their servers and Huawei doesn’t have a high market share in terms of such equipment,” he was quoted as saying by the newspaper Taipei Times.

The commission itself does not use any Chinese-made cybersecurity equipment, Koo said.

Huawei, based in southern China’s Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, is the world’s largest supplier of network gear. ZTE is one of its rivals Huawei has established a presence in Taiwan, with its handsets among the top sellers. The company also sponsors a Christmas extravaganza in a Taipei suburb that features a giant Santa emblazoned with Huawei’s logo.

While several countries have similar bans in place, the risk for Taiwan is potentially greater since China claims the island as its own territory and threatens to use military force to bring it under its control. Back-doors that some allege Huawei has built into its products could give Beijing access to military and economic secrets or even to disable crucial infrastructure in the event of a conflict.

Taiwan has already accused China of meddling in last month’s local elections by spreading false news online. AP

PROTESTERS DISRUPT U.S. FOSSIL FUEL EVENT AT U.N. CLIMATE TALKS

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ATOWICE, Poland—Protesters disrupted a US government event at United Nations climate talks on Monday, criticizing the Trump administration’s policy of backing the extraction of fossil fuels that contribute to global warming.

About 100 people from groups representing indigenous peoples and youth stood up and chanted “Keep it in the ground” near the beginning of the American presentation. As cameras swarmed around them, some of the protesters explained the extraction of coal, oil and natural gas affects their communities.

The US event, titled “US Innovative Technologies Spur Economic Dynamism,” took place on the sidelines of the ongoing UN meeting in Katowice, Poland. After several minutes, the activists left the room chanting “Shame on you.” Their actions mirrored a similar protest during a US-hosted panel at last year’s UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany.

Wells Griffith, a Trump administration adviser at the Department of Energy, said after the interruption that the United States would continue extracting fossil fuels, including through hydraulic fracking.

Speaking at the event, Griffith warned against “alarmism” over climate change, adding that “all energy sources are important, and they will be utilized unapologetically.”

The panel’s premise—that fossil fuels can be made “clean” through innovation—stands at odds with recommendations from scientists who say countries should transition to renewable energy sources as soon as possible or risk catastrophic levels of global warming by the end of the century.

Investors, too, have backed a shift away from fossil fuels. On Monday, 415 pension funds and insurance companies, with over $32 trillion in assets, called on governments to phase out coal-fired power plants and put a meaningful price on carbon to help tackle climate change.

Jan Erik Saugestad, the chief executive of Storebrand, a Norwegian fund that manages $85

billion in assets, said even highly efficient coal plants are highly damaging to the environment and carbon capture technology—touted by some as a way to pull emissions out of the air again—isn’t economical.

“Investors are not going to be sold fake news on coal, which seeks to mask the rapid decline of the US coal industry and disregards the solar and wind growth markets,” said Saugestad.

Even as the Trump administration promoted coal abroad, new figures show coal consumption by the US power grid this year will be the lowest since 1979 as a wave of coal-fired power plants shut down.

Andrew Light, a former US State Department official, said the US event was unlikely to affect the landmark Paris agreement to limit global warming.

Most of the world’s countries are signatories to the 2015 agreement, while President Donald J. Trump has said he will withdraw the United States from it.

“This event has the audience of one person and that is President Trump,” said Light, who is now a senior adviser with the environmental group World Resources Institute. He said the US government’s arguments were more likely to upset than win over other governments represented at the talks in Katowice.

Over the weekend, the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait prevented endorsement of a scientific report on keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—the most ambitious target in the 2015 Paris climate accord. The State Department said US officials didn’t discuss their position in advance with the other countries.

Washington sent a small delegation to the summit in Poland because the US is technically still part of the accord.

Ministers and senior officials arrived on Monday in Katowice for the second half of the meeting, which still has numerous hurdles to take before the scheduled end on December 14.

Bloomberg News

can complaints about Beijing’s technology policy.

The Huawei chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested the same day in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Despite that, the Commerce Ministry said last week Beijing would carry out terms of the ceasefire and expressed optimism a deal can be reached during the 90-day period.

The Chinese government raised more doubts over the weekend when it demanded Canada and the United States withdraw the charges and release Meng, the

daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, or face unspecified “grave consequences.”

Trump approved tariff hikes of 25 percent on $50 billion of Chinese goods, and 10 percent on another $200 billion of imports in response to complaints Beijing steals or pressures companies to hand over technology.

China retaliated with penalties on $110 billion of American goods but is running out of imports for retaliation due to their lopsided trade balance. Trump has threatened to expand charges to all goods from China. AP

China’s foreign minister vows to defend citizens abroad

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EIJING—China’s foreign minister vowed on Tuesday to protect its citizens abroad as a technology executive waited to see whether a Canadian court will release her on bail in a case that has riled US-Chinese relations.

Beijing will “spare no effort” to protect against “any bullying that infringes the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at a conference in Shanghai. Wang didn’t mention the arrested Huawei Technologies Ltd. executive, Meng Wanzhou. But a ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, said Wang was referring to cases of all Chinese abroad, including Meng.

Meng was arrested on December 1 in Vancouver on US charges related to possible violations of trade sanctions on Iran. The same day, Presidents Donald J. Trump and Xi Jinping agreed to a 90-day cease-fire in an escalating

tariff war that threatens to hamper global economic growth.

The arrest prompted concern trade talks might be derailed, but Beijing indicated on Tuesday they were going ahead.

The Ministry of Commerce said China’s economy czar, Vice Premier Liu He, talked by phone with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer about the next round of negotiations but gave no details of preparations.

Washington accuses Huawei of using a Hong Kong shell company to sell equipment to Iran in violation of US sanctions. It says Meng and Huawei misled banks about the company’s business dealings in Iran.

After a second daylong session, a judge in Vancouver, Justice William Ehrcke, said a bail hearing would continue on Tuesday. AP

A6 Wednesday, December 12, 2018 • Editor: Angel R. Calso

Opinion BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

editorial

About time to reap the peace dividend

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HE planet’s most intense storm this year first unleashed its fury in the Philippines before it rammed into Hong Kong in September.

Typhoon Ompong (international code name Mangkhut) crossed Northern Luzon and ravaged provinces considered as the country’s major producers of rice and corn. Heavy rains and floods brought about

by Ompong destroyed more than P27 billion worth of rice and corn crops in Northern Luzon.

The havoc wreaked by Ompong on the rice sector prompted the Department of Agriculture (DA) to revise downward its projection for palay output this year. The destruction of rice crops has also forced the government to increase its purchases of the staple from neighboring Southeast Asian countries. But even before Northern Luzon could recover from Ompong, Typhoon Rosita (international code name Yutu) hit the region in October and laid to waste some P2 billion worth of crops.

Most of the 20 or so typhoons that visit the Philippines every year cross the island of Luzon, where rice and corn—the country’s staple grains—are produced. Provinces in Northern Luzon are major producers of corn and vegetables, while Central Luzon is known as the country’s rice granary. But these regions lie in the path of typhoons that usually enter the Philippine area of responsibility in July to September. Not all typhoons are destructive, but the country has been experiencing strong storms in recent years due to climate change.

For years, experts have been urging the government to develop Mindanao and realize its potential as the country’s food basket. The region’s reputation was based on the fact that the southern part of the country is practically insulated from strong typhoons. The availability of contiguous lands also makes Mindanao an ideal area for food production.

Local and foreign firms that export high-value crops favor Mindanao due to its climate and topography.

Experts have cited the peace and order situation in Mindanao as a major obstacle to the full development of the region’s agricultural sector. But this will soon improve with the possible ratification of the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL). The set up of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region will usher in a new era in Mindanao and the government should jump-start Mindanao’s march to progress by empowering its agricultural sector.

Mindanao is replete with examples of successful agribusiness ventures. Major exporters of high-value crops, such as Dole and Sumifru, provide lessons that the region’s farmers could adopt. These firms observe so-called Good Agricultural Practices, which importing countries require before they allow the entry of Philippine vegetables and fruits in their markets. The government may consider tapping these firms as “big brothers” to Mindanao farmers who wish to venture into food exports.

The success of big agribusiness ventures in a turbulent region speaks volumes about the potential of Mindanao to feed the entire country and improve farmers’ incomes. If this is done, the government will not have to spend billions of pesos just to help farmers in typhoon-prone areas recover from the devastation of natural disasters year after year. What the government can save from rehabilitation efforts would be spent to develop areas where other cash crops, such as cacao and rubber, can be grown. Climate-proofing the Philippine agriculture sector is a desirable strategy, but identifying the right areas where food can be grown all year round makes more economic sense.

Since 2005

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Susan V. Ople

SCRIBBLES

O

N Monday, 168 member-states of the United Nations signed the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), making it the first comprehensive international framework on how to manage people on the move.

Why is this important to the Philippines given the sheer size of its overseas population? The Compact recognizes that our own government is not alone in making sure that our modern-day heroes get the protection that they deserve. It says that all nations have to share in that responsibility, just as we equally have to share in the obligations to protect the migrants living in the Philippines.

For all eyes on earth to be able to read, reflect on and follow an actual document that captures the world’s perception of migration, is something short of a miracle.

Let me quote from the Global Compact: “It is crucial that the challenges and opportunities of international migration unite us, rather than divide us. This Global Compact sets out our common understanding, shared responsibilities and unity of purpose regarding migration, making it work for all.”

Two words: shared responsibilities. I believe that phrase is the one that will make this compact soar.

During the ’70s and ’80s, when my father, the late Blas Ople, was labor minister, he often spoke of how difficult it was to get labor ministers from labor-sending and labor-receiving countries together in one room to discuss labor migration.

When practiced bilaterally, regionally and multilaterally, that magical phrase, “shared responsibilities,” can save lives.

1. Shared responsibilities in promoting fair and ethical recruitment can lead to international cooperation on the elimination of hidden charges that lead a domestic worker into debt bondage. It also means zero tolerance for substitution of contracts in favor of involuntary servitude.

2. Shared responsibilities in establishing comprehensive and needsbased pre-departure and post-arrival programs for migrant workers would result in their empowerment, safety

Sadly, countries such as the United States, Austria, Australia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and the Dominican Republic opted out of the process. Their domestic border concerns may have prevailed, with the US government describing the pact as advancing global governance at the expense of the sovereign rights of states.

and protection. This can also be a stepping-stone toward the education of foreign employers and foreign recruitment agencies.

3. Shared responsibilities in enacting and implementing legislation that penalizes hate crimes targeting migrants would lead to a kinder and more compassionate world, where one matters not because of the color of the skin or the origin of your passport, but by virtue of who you are.

4. Shared responsibilities also mean ensuring that the hard-earned money of an honest, diligent migrant worker is not eaten up by monopolistic fees charged by foreign banks in the guise of a sweeping anti-moneylaundering policy.

5. Shared responsibilities include provisions for sustainable reintegration pathways for migrants, overseas workers, and especially for the reentry of children on the move.

Our Department of Foreign Affairs served as the voice of migrant

Beware of ‘Falcon1’ and ‘Falcon2’

Lorenzo M. Lomibao Jr., Gerard S. Ramos Lyn B. Resurreccion, Efleda P. Campos Dennis D. Estopace

Online Editor Social Media Editor

Chairman of the Board & Ombudsman President VP-Finance VP Advertising Sales Advertising Sales Manager Group Circulation Manager

On the importance of the Global Compact on Migration

Florante S. Solmerin

FACT IS MIGHT!

T

O all businessmen who have clear intentions for the Small Town Lottery (STL) operations of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO), beware of “Falcon1” (F1) and “Falcon2” (F2) because these two have strong networks reaching up to Mindanao just to get millions of money.

I will identify these people in my future column if they will not stop their evil deeds.

I already have with me some evidence—like audio recording of the telephone conversations featuring these corrupt personalities who bastardize the STL just to get millions of money. I admire the guts of one corrupt personality involved. I thought he’s smart, but he’s dumb.

Maybe F1 and F2 are also related to my previous exposé about this group led by a dekampanilya couple

with a “Duterte” family name, according to the description of my “A1”.

Members of this group allegedly brag that they can negotiate with the officers inside PCSO for a particular businessman or corporation who wants to play STL, but they need to “lock in” the authorization to make “sure” they will get it.

The “lock-in money” depends on the computation based on the Presumptive Monthly Retail Receipts.

Some individuals have already fell into this lock-in racket or scheme,

and they are willing to testify (if needed) just to stop this scheme.

These businessmen are our allies who want to help the government, the Duterte administration, to gather funds legally through STL for the health and charity programs of the government.

Apart from STL, revenues from Lotto and Sweepstakes help fund the government’s free medicines program for sick patients, to pay hospitalization expenses, chemotherapy and dialysis sessions, transplants and implants, donate free ambulances and fund hospital equipment.

But due to vested interests of some individuals, they are destroying the STL operations. They should be held liable for their misdeeds. If the President finds out what they are doing, I don’t know where they can hide.

To whom it may concern: If I were you, I’ll fly away while I still can. According to my A1, you are already being investigated. Apparently, there’s an “initial ist” of the people involved, based on the evidence gathered.

workers everywhere throughout the negotiations for the historic compact. In the margins of plenary discussions, some countries would sidle up to our own diplomats to inquire on whether their wordings were acceptable to the Philippine contingent.

Sadly, countries such as the United States, Austria, Australia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and the Dominican Republic opted out of the process. Their domestic border concerns may have prevailed, with the US government describing the pact as advancing global governance at the expense of the sovereign rights of states.

We must not begrudge these nations their own parochial interests.

Protectionism over multilateralism has increasingly become the lone pragmatic choice for political leaders aiming to please their anxious constituents. A careful reading of the Compact, however, shows nothing but utmost respect for sovereign rights of nations. It merely counsels the world that migration is here to stay, and that it must be managed fairly to ensure that the sunlight of human rights never dims.

The Global Compact on Migration informs us about the kinder world we live in, and why this is, indeed, a great time to be alive.

Susan Ople heads the Blas F. Ople Policy Center and Training Institute, a nonprofit organization that deals with labor and migration issues. She also represents the OFW sector in the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking or IACAT.

Meanwhile, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) Undersecretary Lorraine Marie T. Badoy for supporting PCSO, especially the Office of the General Manager under the leadership of retired Marine Maj. Gen. Alexander “Mandirigma” Balutan.

I didn’t know PCOO already included materials coming from Mandirigma’s official Facebook page www.facebook.com/mandirigma83 (Mandirigma sa Kawanggawa) in their massive information/dissemination campaign.

We know Usec Badoy has bashers in social media, especially those personalities who use the name of President Duterte. But she remains focused on her job and does not let these bashers affect her.

In fact, she praised the good leadership of the PCSO General Manager, especially with the continued information/dissemination campaign that caters to the Filipino people.

Thank you very much Usec Badoy.

I salute you and PCOO under the leadership of Secretary Martin Andanar!

Opinion BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Wednesday, December 12, 2018 A7

The presidency or prison Southeast Asia Disaster Risk Insurance Facility

By Michelle Goldberg New York Times News Service

D

ONALD J. TRUMP—or, as he’s known to federal prosecutors, Individual-1—might well be a criminal. That’s no longer just my opinion, or that of Democratic activists. It is the finding of Trump’s own Justice Department.

On Friday, federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York filed a sentencing memorandum for Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, who is definitely a criminal.

The prosecutors argued that, in arranging payoffs to two women who said they’d had affairs with Trump, Cohen broke campaign finance laws, and in the process “deceived the voting public by hiding alleged facts that he believed would have had a substantial effect on the election.”

The filing emphasized the way Cohen’s actions subverted democracy. “While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows,” prosecutors wrote. And he didn’t act alone, but “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1.” In other words, lawyers from the Justice Department have concluded that Trump may have committed a felony that went to the heart of the process that put him in office.

Trump’s potential criminality in this case, which raises questions about his legitimacy as president, creates a quandary for Democrats. Assuming prosecutors are right about Trump’s conduct, it certainly seems impeachable; a situation in which a candidate cheats his way into the presidency is one the founders foresaw when they were designing the impeachment process. As George Mason argued at the Constitutional Convention, “Shall the man who has practiced corruption, and by that means procured his appointment in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment by repeating his guilt?”

But in our current moment, removing the president through impeachment is essentially impossible, given that at least 20 Senate Republicans would have to join Democrats.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who will soon lead the House Judiciary Committee, told me he wouldn’t consider impeachment proceedings without at least some Republican support.

There is certainly no appetite among congressional Democrats to pursue impeachment over a campaign finance case, particularly while the special counsel investigation into Russian collusion chugs on.

This leaves us in a dangerous situation. Under Justice Department guidelines, sitting presidents can’t be indicted. Ex-presidents, however, can. Experts on both the left and the right believe that if Trump is voted out of office in 2020, before

the five-year statute of limitations on campaign finance violations runs out, he could find himself in serious legal jeopardy.

The conservative Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and frequent Trump defender, wrote on Fox News’s web site on Sunday, “The president is very likely to be indicted on a charge of violating federal campaign finance laws.” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., a former prosecutor, told me, “This president has potential prison exposure.”

The 2020 presidential election was always going to be extraordinarily ugly, but one can only imagine what Trump will do if the alternative to the White House is the big house.

“It’s dangerous,” said Swalwell, who worries that Trump could become even more erratic, making decisions to save himself that involve “our troops or internal domestic security.”

Ordinarily, you know that a democracy is failing when electoral losers are threatened with prison.

But Trump’s lawlessness is so blatant that impunity—say, a pardon, or a politically motivated decision not to prosecute—would also be deeply corrosive, unless it was offered in return for his resignation.

There’s simply no way around it—as long as Individual-1 is on the ticket, the 2020 election is set to be a banana republic-style death match.

Trump will almost certainly try to criminalize his opponent—crowds at his rallies have taken to chanting “Lock her up” at the mention of virtually any Democratic woman’s name. And Democrats won’t be able to uphold the general principle that in American elections, losing doesn’t mean personal ruination, because for Trump it will and it should.

There are ways to lower the stakes somewhat. Nadler told me he plans to introduce legislation that would freeze the statute of limitations for crimes committed by presidents, so they could be charged when their terms end. Such a law would at least mean that Trump couldn’t evade justice forever just by winning reelection.

That would mitigate the peril to our democracy, but it wouldn’t come close to eliminating it. Our best hope may lie in the emergence of irrefutable evidence of further presidential crimes, enough to finally test the tolerance of at least some fraction of Republicans.

“The story’s not over yet,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a former constitutional law professor, told me.

“We’re just at the beginning of it.

After two years of hearing people say we were all trigger-happy on impeachment, now I’m hearing we’re all constitutional fraidy-cats. Give us a chance to do the fact investigation and figure out what happened.”

Fair enough. But if the president has committed felonies, we also have to figure out how Republicans might be induced to care.

Dennis B. Funa

INSURANCE FORUM

O

N May 5, 2017, the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Cambodia, Ministry of Finance of Lao PDR, Ministry of Planning and Finance of Myanmar and Ministry of Finance of Japan signed a memorandum of understanding for the establishment of a country-led regional technical working group on disaster risk finance and insurance. This new working group will work toward developing the Southeast Asia Disaster Risk Insurance Facility, a regional catastrophe risk pool to provide rapid response financing in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

It will be the first of its kind in Asia. The RTWG is supported by the World Bank and the government of Singapore. The Seadrif Program Multi-Donor Trust Fund has been established with the support of the World Bank.

During the 2018 Asean+3 Finance Ministers’ Meeting, a Joint Statement was issued: “We affirm our commitment to increase the financial resilience of Asean+3 members to climate and disaster risks.

We welcome the agreement to establish a regional catastrophe risk insurance pool for Laos and Myanmar as the first product of the Seadrif, with support from Japan, Singa-

pore and the World Bank. We also recognize that Cambodia may join the regional catastrophe risk insurance pool subject to the result of the feasibility studies. We acknowledge that Seadrif, which will be domiciled in Singapore, aims to provide climate and disaster risk management and insurance solutions to Asean member-states, and helps to narrow the natural catastrophe protection

gap within the region. We welcome the Asean Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program to work and collaborate with Seadrif on some issues, including data assessment and modeling, and capacity building.

We invite other Asean+3 members to join the Seadrif, and encourage donor partners beyond Asean+3 to support this initiative.”

Seadrif will be jointly organized

by Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Seadrif is designed to provide participating countries with access to immediate liquidity, post-disaster, as well as to improve regional cooperation on disaster risk finance.

There are other models, of course, across the globe such as the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, the African Risk Capacity and the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative. With this initiative to address a protection gap, a more resilient Asean region can be expected.

Seadrif will be organized as a captive insurance company fully owned by the participating countries. The corporate governance structure and management will be fully controlled by the participating countries. Funding or seed capital for the facility will be raised through grants, donations and internal funding. Japan, for

The GOP goes full authoritarian

By Paul Krugman

New York Times News Service

D

ONALD J. TRUMP, it turns out, may have been the best thing that could have happened to American democracy.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Individual-1 is clearly a wannabe dictator who has contempt for the rule of law, not to mention being corrupt and probably in the pocket of foreign powers. But he’s also lazy, undisciplined, self-absorbed and inept. And since the threat to democracy is much broader and deeper than one man, we’re actually fortunate that the forces menacing America have such a ludicrous person as their public face.

Yet those forces may prevail all the same.

If you want to understand what’s happening to our country, the book you really need to read is How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. As the authors—professors of government at Harvard— point out, in recent decades a number of nominally democratic nations have become de facto authoritarian, oneparty states. Yet none of them have had classic military coups, with tanks in the street.

What we’ve seen instead are coups of a subtler form: takeovers or intimidation of the news media, rigged elections that disenfranchise opposing voters, new rules of the game that give

the ruling party overwhelming control even if it loses the popular vote, corrupted courts.

The classic example is Hungary, where Fidesz, the white nationalist governing party, has effectively taken over the bulk of the media; destroyed the independence of the Judiciary; rigged voting to enfranchise supporters and disenfranchise opponents; gerrymandered electoral districts in its favor; and altered the rules so that a minority in the popular vote translates into a supermajority in the legislature.

Does a lot of this sound familiar?

It should. You see, Republicans have been adopting similar tactics—not at the federal level (yet), but in states they control.

As Levitsky and Ziblatt say, the states, which Justice Louis Brandeis famously pronounced the laboratories of democracy, “are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose.”

Thus, voter purges and deliberate restriction of minority access to the polls have become standard practice in much of America. Would Brian Kemp, the governor-elect of Georgia—who oversaw his own election as secretary of state—have won without these tactics? Almost certainly not.

And the GOP has engaged in extreme

gerrymandering. Some people have been reassured by the fact that the Democratic landslide in the popular vote for the House did, in fact, translate into a comparable majority in seats held. But you get a lot less reassured if you look at what happened at the state level, where votes often weren’t reflected in terms of control of state legislatures.

Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Wisconsin.

There has been a fair amount of reporting on the power grab currently underway in Madison. Having lost every statewide office in Wisconsin last month, Republicans are using the lame-duck legislative session to drastically curtail these offices’ power, effectively keeping rule over the state in the hands of the GOP-controlled legislature.

What has gotten less emphasis is the fact that GOP legislative control is “also” undemocratic. Last month Democratic candidates received 54 percent of the votes in state Assembly elections—but they ended up with only 37 percent of the seats.

In other words, Wisconsin is turning into Hungary on the Great Lakes, a state that may hold elections, but where elections don’t matter, because the ruling party retains control no matter what voters do.

And here’s the thing: As far as I can tell, not a single prominent Republican in Washington has condemned the

Governance challenges for Baguio City’s creative economy

By May Zuleika Salao & Michael Henry Yusingco

D

ECLARED as a Unesco Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art in 2017, Baguio City officially joined the Unesco Creative Cities Network (UCCN) with its current membership of 180 cities in 72 countries.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda serve as impetus for this Unesco initiative, whose goals strike at the core of urban renewal envisioned to arise from the cultural and socioeconomic progress brought by creative industries.

Defined by Unesco as “sectors of organized activity whose principal purpose is the production or reproduction, promotion, distribution and/or commercialization of goods, services and activities of a cultural, artistic or heritagerelated nature,” creative industries power the currently evolving global Creative Economy.

This Creative Economy is global yet anchored on the local as it fuses culture with commerce. It pulls within its ambit of influence no less than

a lifeworld shaping our life chances as a nation.

Indeed, the nation becomes a consolidating agent. The base of a Creative Economy is culture, and we derive our culture’s richness together with our uniqueness as individuals from our nation. Our shared history and meanings with our ways of thinking and doing form a common pool resource, where we Filipinos can each draw our innovative capacities for building our creative industries.

And here, we see that the road toward a prosperous Philippine Creative Economy—this impressive brand called “Creative Philippines” that we offer globally, has to be paved with cutting-edge Filipino mind work.

This is mind work distinctly ours, thus underscoring high-level

education and training for the Filipino creative artist. Tied with this as self-evident is upward mobility for value creation. Most of all, our citizenry requires the social imperatives enriching of its collective creative source: our national culture.

Note, however, that the Unesco Creative City declaration poses governance challenges not just for Baguio City but for the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) as well. Baguio City acts as the hub of creativity pulsating to and from the peripheral localities of Benguet and the rest of the Cordillera. The Cordillera region is intrinsic to this creative culture as well as economy and, therefore, a regional perspective for development planning is rendered inevitable.

Governance as a nonhierarchical mode of directing collective action depends on a network of stakeholders for success, based on shared accountability. It renders the government with its agencies as nodes connected to other nodes from business and civil society—and these node connections form a spread, that is, a

flat organization placing high value on cooperation for development.

This development cooperation from as many stakeholders shifts attention toward the effective political scale that can facilitate this inclusiveness. And, following subsidiarity, it comprises our smallest viable units—from the barangays to their municipalities onto the regions. Hence, this governance detaches from the center as enabled by decentralization.

Therefore, we have to ask, can the current governance framework based on the Local Government Code respond to the demands of being a Creative City? Is there an institutionalized mechanism that may facilitate coordination among city and national government agencies together with other stakeholders from business, civil society and the general public?

At the regional level, what could be the role of the CAR in this Creative City developmental trajectory?

How does the CAR facilitate linkages between its various local governments? And for Baguio City, how

is it a catalyst of local and regional development?

Crucially, the Creative Economy as decentralized governance of creative industries highlights the urban space—regenerating cities as creative hubs linked into a network. This means creative city hubs linked nationwide for a “Creative Philippines.” While for its largest political scale, the UCCN acts as one such agent pushing for global Creative City linkages, thus connoting international relations at the municipal level among other institutional requirements for development cooperation.

As a Unesco Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art, Baguio City presently assumes being our country’s premier test case. As a social laboratory for a Creative Economy, Baguio City unravels our institutional infrastructure for harnessing creativity in our local and regional economies and for establishing city linkages at both national and global levels.

Clearly, Baguio City and CAR can greatly benefit from having institutional links with other Unesco

example, has committed $3.2 million. Seadrif will be backed by reinsurance. Seadrif Insurance Co. will be established in Singapore.

Other Asean+3 member countries, including the Philippines, are welcome to join.

The objective of Seadrif is to provide its members with rapid response financing immediately upon the occurrence of a disaster to complement their national funds.

The Southeast Asia region is highly exposed to natural disasters, but the insurance markets are underdeveloped to absorb post-disaster costs.

In Myanmar, for example, during the 2015 floods, 55 percent of the losses were due to infrastructure damage. In Laos, the average annual cost of emergency response to floods is $10 million.

Under this Seadrif scheme, the participating countries contribute, as premium, for a three-year coverage. The premium is based on the risk profile and level of coverage. There is no cross-subsidization. Meaning, premiums are paid by each country based only on their own risk.

Dennis B. Funa is the current insurance commissioner. Funa was appointed by President Duterte as the new insurance commissioner in December 2016.

E-mail: dennisfuna@yahoo.com.

power grab in Wisconsin, the similar grab in Michigan or even what looks like outright electoral fraud in North Carolina. Elected Republicans don’t just increasingly share the values of white nationalist parties like Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice; they also share those parties’ contempt for democracy. The GOP is an authoritarian party in waiting.

Which is why we should be grateful for Trump. If he weren’t so flamboyantly awful, Democrats might have won the House popular vote by only four or five points, not 8.6 points.

And in that case, Republicans might have maintained control—and we’d be well along the path to permanent one-party rule. Instead, we’re heading for a period of divided government, in which the opposition party has both the power to block legislation and, perhaps even more important, the ability to conduct investigations backed by subpoena power into Trump administration malfeasance.

But this may be no more than a respite. For whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you.

The fact is that the GOP, as currently constituted, is willing to do whatever it takes to seize and hold power. And as long as that remains true, and Republicans remain politically competitive, we will be one election away from losing democracy in America.

creative cities, such as Incheon, Melbourne and Berlin. Needless to say, establishing these linkages within the present decentralization legal framework is likewise a serious governance challenge.

In her opening message at ENTACool: 2018 Baguio Creative Festival on November 10, Lila Shahani, the secretary-general of the Philippine National Commission to Unesco, warned that the creative city designation is in peril of being withdrawn “when the local government and the community do not sustain, protect and nurture—in short: take responsibility for and invest in— the creative environment that led to the Unesco designation in the first place.”

Therefore, these governance challenges enumerated here must be addressed with utmost urgency.

May Zuleika Salao, PhD, is director of the Political Economy Program of the School of Law and Governance, University of Asia and the Pacific.

Michael Henry Yusingco, LLM, is a nonresident research fellow of the Ateneo Policy Center at the Ateneo School of Government.

2nd Front Page BusinessMirror

A8 Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Foreign direct investments fell by nearly a third in Sept

F

By Bianca Cuaresma

@BcuaresmaBM

OREIGN investments placed in the Philippines for long-term yield declined by almost a third in September this year, as equity capital withdrawals expanded during the period, according to data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).

The BSP announced that net inflows of foreign direct investments (FDI) hit $569 million in September, 29.4 percent lower than the $807-million FDI net inflows

recorded last year.

The culprit behind the decline, according to BSP data, was the sizeable rise in equity capital withdrawals, which reached $187 mil-

$569M FDI net inflows in September 2018, a figure that is 29.4 percent lower than the $807 million recorded in 2017

lion, exceeding the $69 million in equity capital placements during the period.

FDI is the type of investment that is often more coveted, as it stays longer in the economy and creates jobs for locals.

It is also not easily pulled out of the market unlike its shorterterm counterpart, the foreign portfolio investments.

In September, the equity capital infusions were mainly from the United States, Japan, Macau, Hong Kong and China. The investments were channeled mostly to real estate, manufacturing and electricity, gas, steam and air-conditioning supply activities.

Among other subcomponents of the FDI, debt instruments—which consist mainly of intercompany borrowings and lending between foreign direct investors and their subsidiaries and affiliates in the Philippines—grew by 24.3 percent to $609 million, from last year’s $490 million.

Reinvest ment of ea r nings amounted to $78 million during the month, according to BSP data.

See “Investments,” A2

Draft federal charter hurdles House on third reading

By Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz @joveemarie

T

HE House of Representatives on Wednesday approved on third and final reading the draft Federal Constitution of the Philippines, which no longer prescribes term limits for lawmakers and contains provisions relaxing foreign ownership restrictions.

Voting 224 affirmatives, 22 negatives and three abstentions, the lower chamber passed the Resolution of Both Houses (RBH) 15. House Constitutional Amendments Committee Chairman Vicente Veloso of Leyte said the draft federal charter is a product of two years of public consultations and several other drafts proposed by the PDP-Laban, the Consultative Committee, former ABS Party-list Rep.

Eugene de Vera and Pampanga Rep. Aurelio Gonzales.

RBH 15 is one the priority measures mentioned by President Duterte in his last State of the Nation Address. The resolution will be transmitted to the Senate for its own deliberations.

Foreign ownership THE proposed federal charter amends certain economic provisions of the 1987 Constitution by relaxing restrictive foreign ownership rules to attract more investments.

RBH 15 will lift some of provisions of the current charter against the entry of foreign investors by inserting a phrase “unless otherwise provided by law.”

Under the draft federal charter’s Section 3, unless otherwise provided by law, private corporations or associations may not hold such alienable lands

NORTHEAST MONSOON AFFECTING NORTHERN LUZON as of 4:00 pm - December 11, 2018

of the public domain except by lease, for a period not exceeding 25 year, renewable for not more than 25 years and not to exceed 1,000 hectares in area.

Lands of the public domain are classified into agricultural lands, reclaimed lands, forest or timber lands, mineral lands and national parks.

Also Section 7 indicated that except in cases of hereditary succession, no private lands shall be transferred or conveyed except to individuals, corporations, or associations qualified to acquire or hold lands of the public domain, unless otherwise provided by law.

Under Section 11, unless otherwise provided by law, no franchise, certificate, or any other form of authorization for the operation of a public utility shall be granted except to citizens of the Philippines or to corporations or associations organized under the

laws of the Philippines. Filipinos must own at least 60 percent of the capital.

Neither shall any such franchise or right be granted except under the condition that it shall be subject to amendment, alteration, or repeal by Congress when the common good so requires.

Term limits RBH 15, principally authored by Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, seeks a presidential-bicameral-federal system of government. It also empowers Congress to establish federal states by convening itself into a constituent assembly.

The draft charter lifts the term limits for members of Congress and requires lawmakers to have a college degree.

Under RBH 15, the first election under the new Constitution shall be held on the second Monday of May 2022.

The term of the president and vice president, which shall end in 2022, will not be extended. The incumbent president is prohibited from running in the 2022 elections.

Under the resolution, in case a vacancy arises by reason of removal, resignation, permanent incapacity or death of the incumbent president, the incumbent vice president shall act as president until a president has been chosen and qualified.

‘Not viable’ ALBAY Rep. Edcel C. Lagman, who voted against RBH 15, said the Charter change embodied in the resolution is “an initiative that has floundered before it could take off.”

“Its centerpiece agenda on the shift to federalism is a virtual centerfold because it is bare. No less than President Duterte’s economic advisers have exposed it as not economically viable,” Lagman added.

He said the “undue haste” in shifting from the unitary to the federal system of government will cause the “further deterioration” of the economy.

“The President’s chief economist, National Economic and Development Authority [Neda] Director General Ernesto Pernia, has scored the country’s lack of preparedness for a shift to federalism,” Lagman said.

“He [Pernia] said majority of our regions are fiscally ill prepared for federalism. He also said that only the National Capital Region, Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog [Calabarzon], and lately Cebu, or only four out of the possible 18 federated regions have the political and economic infrastructure that would allow them to adopt federalism,” he added.

Lagman noted that Pernia had observed that implementing federalism before the country is ready would be detrimental to the country’s economy.

He said Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III has, likewise, ventilated his concerns and said the transformation could lead to “dire, irreversible economic consequences.”

www.businessmirror.com.ph

PALACE TAX PACKAGE STALLED BY P3.7-TRILLION BUDGET BILL FOR 2019

By Butch Fernandez @butchfBM

S

ENATORS confirmed on Tuesday Budget Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno’s apprehension that the Duterte administration’s controversial tax-reform package is not likely to be approved by Congress this year, as lawmakers focus their efforts on first passing the proposed P3.7-trillion 2019 budget bill before lawmakers adjourn for their Christmas recess on December 14.

“We do not have the time to pass the CTRP [Comprehensive Tax Reform Program],” Sen. Sherwin T. Gatchalian told the BusinessMirror.

Gatchalian explained this was “because of the delay in the transmittal of the 2019 budget bill from the House of Representatives to the Senate.”

He affirmed that the senators’ priority now is to first pass a new General Appropriations Act (GAA) before their Christmas break, in a bid to avert a looming scenario that has the government operating under a reenacted budget in January.

Diokno earlier told the BusinessMirror a more realistic scenario was that the tax bills would be tackled and approved till beyond the May 2019 elections. However, Diokno did not see the time constraint imposed by the budget bill as the main reason for the stalled timeline of the CTRP packages. Instead, he cited what he saw as the senators’ “resistance” to certain key features of these tax packages.

Health budget cuts THIS developed as Senate Minority Leader Franklin M. Drilon prodded the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Sen. Loren Legarda, to restore P16.8 billion of the P28-billion fund slashed from the 2019 budget of the Department of Health (DOH).

The Minority Leader took the floor during deliberations on the P79-billion budget of the DOH, lamenting how an agency at the forefront of the government’s social protection program would “have its budget slashed by about P28 billion.”

Drilon lamented that the huge P16.8-billion cut in the DOH budget is expected to adversely affect the Health Facilities Enhancement Program (HFEP).

If the budget cut is not restored, a number of health facilities that have either been wholly or partially completed would “remain unutilized to the detriment of the poor and the vulnerable,” the senator said.

For instance, Drilon noted there

Digital. . .

Continued from A1

The human capital category seeks to measure a country’s performance according to the quality and quantity of people that can create digital transformation environments.

The last category aims to gauge countries’ performance in their ability to absorb and benefit from digital technology that is available in the market.

The Philippines’s ranking in digital infrastructure was 11th with a score of 9.7.

Its ranking slipped one notch, while countries like India improved four notches and Japan, two notches.

Data showed only 4 percent of homes and buildings in the Philippines have superfast connectivity, unlike Singapore at 97 percent; mainland China, 77 percent; and Hong Kong, 74 percent.

Human capital

THE EIU white paper stated that the Philippines’s performance in terms of human capital remained stagnant at 9th overall with a score of 20.4. Data showed telecommunication professionals in the Philippines only account for 1 percent of the work force.

Telecommunication professionals in other

are 900 health facilities with 100percent completed infrastructure and existing human resource but they need equipment for licensing and/or PhilHealth accreditation.

The budget for which, amounting to P7.4 billion, however, was part of the P16.8 billion that was cut from the DOH’s budget, he pointed out.

In addition, Drilon said there are 328 health facilities that are at least 80- to 90-percent complete, but are now “in danger of being left unfinished due to the budget cut.”

Drilon aired apprehension that this will “have very adverse effects on our health program. [Many rural health units and district hospitals will be left hanging],” as the budget that was slashed is supposed to fund the health infrastructure requirement for Universal Health Care. “ These funds are necessary in order to enable the health facilities to deliver better services.”

He lamented that the budget cut is not consistent with President Duterte’s budget message vowing to increase investment on social protection.

“We have taken the position that the massive cuts in the population-related positions, including the Department of Health, National Housing Authority, are not consistent with the President’s budget message,” said Drilon.

He added: “I don’t think we can face our people with the revelations that there are some districts which will get P2.4 billion for farm-to-market roads and yet, here, there are about 900 health facilities that are completed and manned but would not be able to operate because the budget was cut.” Drilon was referring to the earlier revelation made

by Sen. Panfilo M. Lacson Sr. about congressional insertions in the 2019 budget bill.

Besides the health department, Drilon said, “more social protection agencies also suffered huge budget cuts.”

He listed: the Department of Social Welfare and Development whose budget was cut by 2.7 percent; the Department of Agriculture, a 7.5-percent reduction in budget; the Department of Education, 9.8 percent; and the National Housing Authority, 87.7 percent.

According to Drilon, Senate Finance Committee chief Legarda has agreed with his findings and “vowed to work with the minority leader” in restoring the budget of DOH. “I don’t think that there is any argument that will justify the non-reinstatement of the budget,” says Drilon.

countries like Singapore and Hong Kong account for 8 percent and 5 percent of the work force, respectively.

Connectivity

IN terms of industry connectivity, the country’s ranking slipped two notches to last place with a score of 11.3. EIU cited data from the 2016 Global Open Data Index, which showed the country only scored 30 percent.

“Foremost among these were big data and analytics, while mobile apps and services, mobile devices and cloud computing— naturally along with cyber security tools— were also high on their priority list. Large numbers also pointed to AI, robotics and the IoT [Internet of Things],” EIU said.

“To generate the desired benefits, these technologies need to be used in combinations.

It is the ability of firms to use these in an integrated manner, which will determine the scale of their contribution to digital transformation,” it added.

The white paper said the success of a country’s digital transformation lies in changing employee mindsets and organizational culture, as much as access to technology and specialists.

Nonetheless, EIU said Asian countries have companies with senior managers who are as able as those in Western countries to bring about technological change. Cai U. Ordinario

Editor: Efleda P. Campos

Companies BusinessMirror

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

B1

Rockwell board allocates ₧7-B capex in next 3 years

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By VG Cabuag

@villygc

HE board of Rockwell Land Corp., the property development arm of the Lopez group, has approved the allocation of P7 billion in capital expenditures (capex) coming out of its total retained earnings of P12.1 billion as of end September.

In its disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, the company said the capex will be for 2019 through 2021.

The company did not state the total amount it will spend during those years, which may include some borrowings.

This year, the company earlier

said it is spending P14 billion in capex, the bulk of which will be spent on land banking, as it wants to achieve certain ratio as against its assets. It will spend between P4 billion and P5 billion allocated for land banking for 2018 alone.

Last year, the company spent P14 billion in capex, but most of

that was to finish its projects, officials said.

Rockwell’s land bank stands at around 50 hectares, or 3 percent.

The company, known for its developments aimed at the higher end of the market, targets a ratio of 12-percent land bank of its assets in one to two years, which translates to about 64 hectares.

At a ratio of 100 percent of its assets, which translates to about 284 hectares, the company needs to increase its land bank by around 220 hectares through next year.

Early this year, Rockwell announced the launch of The Arton’s second tower, the company’s first premium high-rise development in Quezon City. It launched the first tower last year.

“Our venture into the Quezon City area surprised us with robust sales. Riding on this success, we

will officially open inventory for Arton North this June with different sizes per unit type to cater to different market profiles,” Rockwell Land President and CEO Nestor Padilla said.

The P15.6-billion three-tower project is a joint venture with Japan’s largest real-estate company, Mitsui Fudosan Inc. It features an 80:20 landscape-to-building ratio. The entire project is scheduled to be completed by 2023.

Rockwell is also set to launch its first resort development in Mactan, Cebu.

“We remain on the move with our newest development in Punta Engaño boasting of beachfront living. The 5.3-hectare property will have over 200 residential units and a hotel that will serve the growing tourism industry,” Padilla said.

Pilipinas Shell may source from Alegria oil field in South Cebu

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ILIPINA S SHELL Petroleum Corp. may source part of its requirements from the Alegria oil field in Southern Cebu. “ We are a lways eva luating whatever maybe feasible. We still don’t know if it’s compatible to our refinery and is the pricing sufficient for us to make margins.

But we are open-minded. We are still waiting for the results of the sample sent to Hong Kong,” Shell President Cesar Romero said.

The Department of Energ y (DOE) has declared the Alegria oil field, operated by China International Mining Petroleum Co. Ltd. (CIMP), to have commercial quantities of natural gas and oil resources.

CIMP Co. holds Petroleum Service Contract 49, which covers the Alegria oil field.

Energy Secretary Alfonso G. Cusi said the oil field has the potential to power up a 60-megawatt gas plant.

The DOE and CIMP earlier discovered an estimated 27.93 million barrels of oil with a possible production recovery of 3.35 MMBO, or a conservative estimate of 12 percent of total oil in place/reserves.

For natural gas, about 9.42 billion cubic feet of reserves were found, with the recoverable resource estimated at 6.6 bcf or about 70 percent of total natural gas in place/reserves.

Based on the development plan crafted after the initial testing, the natural gas and oil production of the field may last until 2037.

“We are actually interested on that provided that it is economically feasible in terms of compatibility. The type of crude that we process must be matched with the demand profile and capability of the refinery,” Romero said.

In 2016 the DOE and CIMP jointly established the oil field that contained commercial quantities of natural gas upon its discovery of oil accumulation in the adjacent hydrocarbon traps within the Alegria underground area. Lenie Lectura

BOI approves Seaoil depot in Davao Sur

By Elijah Felice E. Rosales @alyasjah

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HE Board of Investments (BOI) has approved the registration of Seaoil Philippines’s additional depot facility in Davao del Sur intended to further cut down gas prices in Mindanao.

The BOI has given the green light to Seaoil’s four storage tank oil depot in Davao del Sur with a combined capacity of 36.9 million liters and is reported to contain gasoline and diesel fuels. The P287-million project qualified for bulk marketing of petroleum products under the Investment Priorities Plan-Special Laws list.

The list pertains to Republic Act 8478, or the Downstream Oil Deregulation Act of 1994, which liberalized the downstream oil industry in order to ensure a competitive market under a regime of fair prices, and adequate and continuous supply of environmentally clean and highquality petrol. It aims to encourage the participation of new industry players through the provision of incentives.

The approved activity started operating in September, and provides the oil firm an additional 36.9 million liters of gasoline and diesel to its existing 41.05 million liters of storage in southern Mindanao. This translates to a sum of 78.15 million liters of fuel capacity for Seaoil.

“This combined capacity is actually more than enough to accommodate the average daily requirement of 73 million liters of fuel nationwide.

The additional storage capacity of fuel may allow the company to efficiently manage its inventory levels and avoid external shocks that could lead to oil price hikes, or at the very

least, mitigate its price increase in several parts of Mindanao,” Trade Undersecretary and BOI Managing Head Ceferino S. Rodolfo Jr. said.

The BOI said Seaoil already has one of the lowest per-liter prices of petrol in Mindanao.

Citing the company’s report, the BOI said the additional depot facility in Davao del Sur could lead to a price drop of around 10 percent, or about P5 cheaper than prevailing prices. This is on top of weekly rollbacks due to the continuing decline in international crude prices.

The BOI also approved the application of Balayan Bay Batangas Development Inc. as a new producer of linear alkylbenzene sulfonate, coconut fatty alcohol sulfate and sodium lauryl ether sulfate with a total sulfonation capacity of 40,000 metric tons annually. BBBDI’s new project is valued at P820 million.

The oleochemicals project is located in Phoenix Petrochemicals and Industrial Park in Calaca, Batangas.

Commercial operations kicked off in October with 102 workers. The chemicals produced by BBBDI are considered essentials in laundry detergent and personal-care items, such as toothpaste, soap bars, shower cream and shampoo.

“Local manufacturers of fastmoving consumer goods such as home personal care and cleaning products, together with the upstream oleochemicals industry, stands to greatly benefit from this project. The products to be produced

by BBBDI will serve as a cost-efficient substitution to previous imported oleochemicals. Local produce means shorter order to delivery lead time, better quality, better pricing and more flexibility,” Rodolfo said.

Monster.com: Online hiring in PHL ‘booming’

O MCKINLEY HILL GRAND CHRISTMAS PARADE Giant character balloons, 12 dazzling floats, over 800 marching bands and street

dancers, 50 mascots, musical performances and appearances by the biggest stars in Philippine entertainment graced the McKinley Hill Grand Christmas Parade where the streets were transformed into a giant production stage. The parade was held on December 8 and witnessed by families and audiences around the Metro. STEPHANIE TUMAMPOS

Subic terminal port gears up for holiday cargo surge T HE Subic Bay International Terminal Corp. (SBITC) is gearing up for the expected influx of cargo this month, noting that this year’s surge will be mainly due to the “exponential growth of consumer demands.”

In a news statement, the company said it has started to accommodate increase imports and exports volume, and is expecting to continue to handle a “significant increase” in cargoes in the coming days.

“The country’s appetite for imported goods is typically highlighted during the Christmas holiday up until Chinese New Year. With a healthy GDP outlook, we can expect this trend to remain a key driver in container volume growth in the months to come,” the statement read.

The company has recorded “continuous growth” in terms of traffic

for 13 months straight since December 2017.

“Recently, we have confirmed further investments in port equipment and systems to continuously outpace market growth. This allows the terminal to remain healthy from a utilization standpoint which we continue to deliver to our customers both at the quay and our gates,” the statement read.

Commonly, goods that pass through Subic Freeport include agricultural equipment, grains and fertilizers, electronic parts and general department store merchandise for North and Central Luzon businesses, particularly in Pampanga and Bulacan.

The company is also “prepared” to handle shipments initially destined for Manila, the Visayas, and Mindanao ports in order to accommodate influx of holiday cargoes this season.

“Businesses in North and Central Luzon benefit most from our services, but we have seen shipments destined not only for Manila, but in the Visayas and Mindanao, as well.

SBITC works with other ports in the Philippines to ensure operational excellence is attained as goods move through these key markets that are in and out of the Philippines,” the statement read.

It uses the one-stop shop system, a facility that houses key authorities and regulatory bodies, to ease the documentary approvals and requirements.

“From enough space and manpower to increased efficiency through our one-stop-shop, our terminal is ready to accommodate the surge of cargo-handling services not just this holiday peak season, but well into 2019 and beyond,” the statement read. Lorenz S. Marasigan

NLINE hiring in the Philippines is booming, with the services sector turning to online recruitment to fill up their roster of employees, according to Monster.com.

In a statement, Monster.com— APAC and Middle East Chief Operating Officer Abhijeet Mukherjee said this is not surprising, since the national government has identified the services sector as one of the pillars of economic growth in the country.

Based on the Monster Employment Index (MEI), online recruitment in the Philippines grew 25 percent, with all industries seeing an increase in online hiring activity except for education.

“The Philippines has always counted on the services sector as one of the strongest and fastest-growing pillars of its economic growth. Government estimates showed the share of the service sector in the country’s gross value-added contribution has been increasing over time, nearly touching 60 percent last year,” Mukherjee said.

“With the government making efforts toward boosting tourism and attracting investments in human resources development, research and development, finance and infrastructure, there is bound to be an uptrend in hiring, especially for related professions,” he added.

Data showed that 11 out of 12 industries saw double-digit year-onyear growth, with health care leading the way with a 41-percent rise from October, up eight points from September’s 33-percent YoY growth.

This was closely followed by the retail industry, which posted a 39-percent growth YoY. Monster.com noted the

local retail sector has been witnessing strong growth in online recruitment since August 2017.

Data also showed that other industries such as banking, financial services and insurance, IT/telecom and advertising also saw notable growth numbers of 26 percent, 23 percent and 22 percent YoY, respectively.

“The only industry in the Philippines to record a decline last month was education with an 8-percent drop between October 2017 and 2018,” Monster.com said.

The MEI also monitors which jobs were in demand in terms of online recruitment. Data showed there was a double-digit growth in demand for all occupations in October.

The occupation that posted the highest growth was in the purchase, logistics, supply chain profession with a 47-percent YoY growth followed by finance and accounts with 39 percent.

Monster.com also said professionals in service-based occupations such as health care, hospitality, and travel and customer service also witnessed notable growth in demand with growth numbers of 36 percent, 19 percent and 10 percent, respectively, between October 2017 and 2018.

The MEI is a monthly gauge of online job posting activity, based on a real-time review of millions of employer job opportunities culled from a large representative selection of career web sites and online job listings across the Philippines.

The Index does not reflect the trend of any one advertiser or source, but is an aggregate measure of the change in job listings across the industry. Cai U. Ordinario

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Companies BusinessMirror

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

PSE STOCK QUOTATIONS

December 11, 2018

Net Foreign Stocks Bid Ask Open High Low Close Volume Value Trade (Peso) Buy (Sell) FINANCIALS

ASIA UNITED 58.95 59 58.95 59 58.95 59 13380 789126 737250 BDO UNIBANK 130 130.4 129.5 130.7 129.5 130 996800 129791130 -15536921 BANK PH ISLANDS 93.7 93.85 93.5 94.25 93.3 93.7 1552260 145572696.5 -37090001 CHINABANK 27.25 27.3 27.75 27.75 27.3 27.3 148200 4058970 -612740 EAST WEST BANK 11.66 11.7 11.6 11.8 11.6 11.66 122500 1431706 -792514 METROBANK 79.8 79.85 79.4 79.8 78.7 79.8 2982260 237326560.5 90800954 PB BANK 11.22 11.48 11.4 11.5 11.22 11.22 110600 1264156 PHIL NATL BANK 42.35 42.5 42.2 42.55 42.2 42.5 177900 7553695 313820 PSBANK 72.5 73.9 72 72.5 72 72.5 200 14442 RCBC 28.3 28.35 28.3 28.35 28.25 28.3 460200 13023510 -1415000 SECURITY BANK 160.2 161 158.2 161.5 158.2 160.2 493760 79014620 -45084194 UNION BANK 65 65.4 66 66 65.4 65.4 108660 7,138,950.5( 6,900,482.5001) BRIGHT KINDLE 1.49 1.53 1.55 1.55 1.49 1.53 66000 99070 1490 COL FINANCIAL 15.4 15.7 15.78 15.8 15.3 15.8 206300 3206486 FERRONOUX HLDG 3.87 3.99 3.84 3.99 3.83 3.99 19000 73080 MEDCO HLDG 0.43 0.475 0.45 0.46 0.42 0.42 220000 94500 NTL REINSURANCE 0.88 0.92 0.91 0.93 0.87 0.92 1029000 930800 -61090 PHIL STOCK EXCH 176 179 178 178 177.1 177.1 330 58624 -1780 VANTAGE 1.14 1.21 1.21 1.21 1.21 1.21 1000 1210

INDUSTRIAL ALSONS CONS 1.25 1.27 1.24 1.28 1.24 1.28 70000 87800 ABOITIZ POWER 32.75 32.8 32.5 32.95 32.2 32.75 488800 15993835 2984640 BASIC ENERGY 0.249 0.255 0.25 0.255 0.25 0.255 4380000 1104450 -137700 FIRST GEN 18.6 18.62 18.64 18.94 18.32 18.6 1262900 23518654 3273586 FIRST PHIL HLDG 64.05 64.3 64.6 64.8 64 64.3 95080 6107913 347551.5 PHIL H2O 5.38 5.45 5.2 5.55 5.2 5.48 398700 2167472 MERALCO 374.2 377 373 378.4 369 377 346680 129813934 26502304 MANILA WATER 26.8 27 27.1 27.1 26.75 26.8 93600 2509580 -1192870 PETRON 8.27 8.28 8.27 8.32 8.23 8.28 1354000 11207594 -545608 PETROENERGY 3.88 3.98 3.9 3.98 3.9 3.9 27000 105380 PHINMA ENERGY 0.89 0.9 0.9 0.91 0.9 0.9 4704000 4255630 -3749910 PHX PETROLEUM 10.9 11 10.84 11 10.84 11 113300 1245432 -1149500 PILIPINAS SHELL 47.65 47.7 47.5 48.1 47.5 47.65 126100 6018240 -1772610 SPC POWER 5.21 5.25 5.2 5.25 5.19 5.25 312500 1626552 AGRINURTURE 17.16 17.24 17.32 17.32 17.08 17.24 493800 8497906 -1040044 CENTURY FOOD 14.68 14.72 14.76 14.76 14.7 14.7 20600 303174 -91206 DEL MONTE 6.47 6.51 6.64 6.64 6.5 6.51 26300 171167 -48922 DNL INDUS 10.1 10.18 10.14 10.24 10.06 10.1 3778500 38,227,758( 3,925,295.9996) EMPERADOR 6.99 7 6.97 7.03 6.96 7 4600900 32232937 -4933389 SMC FOODANDBEV 84 84.05 84.05 84.1 84 84 2042180 171562624.5 112820880 ALLIANCE SELECT 1.04 1.05 1.03 1.07 1.02 1.05 7032000 7369920 199270 GINEBRA 24.55 24.6 25.9 25.9 24.6 24.6 9300 230710 JOLLIBEE 297 297.2 290 297 288.2 297 602960 176993358 10293042 LIBERTY FLOUR 45.05 56.95 60 60 42.5 42.5 1400 66515 MAXS GROUP 10 10.2 10.02 10.38 10 10 850400 8539650 3998274 MG HLDG 0.165 0.172 0.172 0.172 0.172 0.172 10000 1720 PEPSI COLA 1.3 1.31 1.36 1.36 1.31 1.31 553000 727720 -489770 SHAKEYS PIZZA 10.38 10.4 10.4 10.5 10.38 10.4 23300 242808 -220870 ROXAS AND CO 1.78 1.81 1.82 1.82 1.77 1.81 899000 1622370 RFM CORP 4.65 4.75 4.8 4.8 4.7 4.8 31000 147050 UNIV ROBINA 129 129.4 128 129.8 128 129 409310 52717754 -25890923 VITARICH 1.7 1.71 1.75 1.75 1.65 1.71 11321000 19229130 -419860 VICTORIAS 2.32 2.48 2.5 2.5 2.5 2.5 1000 2500 CONCRETE B 78.05 88.9 78.1 78.1 78.1 78.1 4970 388157 -388157 CEMEX HLDG 1.64 1.67 1.69 1.7 1.63 1.65 7148000 11769520 -3347630 DAVINCI CAPITAL 6.38 6.7 6.7 6.8 6.3 6.7 106100 698334 EAGLE CEMENT 14.62 14.7 14.9 14.9 14.56 14.62 129900 1906140 -510026 EEI CORP 8.07 8.19 8.2 8.2 8.05 8.08 151400 1223445 -1115266 HOLCIM 6.05 6.1 6.15 6.18 6.05 6.1 122100 749712 MEGAWIDE 18.26 18.38 18.3 18.5 18.08 18.38 2732000 50139670 6838852 PHINMA 8.21 8.3 8.29 8.29 8.29 8.29 2500 20725 TKC METALS 0.81 0.85 0.85 0.86 0.85 0.85 93000 79220 VULCAN INDL 1.85 1.86 1.83 1.89 1.81 1.85 16874000 31298610 689610 CROWN ASIA 1.65 1.76 1.76 1.76 1.61 1.76 100000 170120 78800 EUROMED 1.5 1.7 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 5000 7500 LMG CHEMICALS 4.1 4.38 4.29 4.31 4.28 4.31 62000 266580 MABUHAY VINYL 3.2 3.32 3.32 3.32 3.32 3.32 1000 3320 PRYCE CORP 5.2 5.52 5.23 5.23 5.2 5.2 69200 360920 -89460 CONCEPCION 37 37.5 37 37 37 37 1300 48100 48100 GREENERGY 2.15 2.16 2.08 2.16 2.01 2.15 16996000 35436120 1203119.9997 INTEGRATED MICR 8.89 8.9 8.7 8.96 8.7 8.89 659800 5864028 1998452 IONICS 1.72 1.73 1.74 1.74 1.66 1.73 293000 492980 PANASONIC 5.89 6 6.15 6.15 6 6 24200 145215 SFA SEMICON 1.4 1.43 1.38 1.45 1.37 1.43 55000 76040 CIRTEK HLDG 31 32 30.65 32 30.5 32 180100 5595185 -1026900

HOLDING & FRIMS ABACORE CAPITAL 0.6 0.61 0.59 0.62 0.56 0.6 41550000 24606080 427360.0001 ASIABEST GROUP 25.5 26 25.05 27 24.1 26 636400 16162555 -3211125 AYALA CORP 929 938 916 938 911 938 253250 234341680 -6809080 ABOITIZ EQUITY 50.8 51.6 51 51.85 50.9 51.6 461550 23678102 -13535031 ALLIANCE GLOBAL 11.7 11.82 11.66 11.92 11.64 11.82 7284000 85787356 7869982 ANSCOR 6.5 6.51 6.44 6.52 6.44 6.5 60200 390792 246450 ANGLO PHIL HLDG 0.81 0.85 0.81 0.85 0.81 0.85 5000 4170 ATN HLDG A 1.35 1.36 1.36 1.39 1.34 1.35 3585000 4869620 ATN HLDG B 1.35 1.36 1.37 1.37 1.35 1.36 742000 1004500 136500 COSCO CAPITAL 7.01 7.06 7.2 7.2 6.94 7.01 4373900 30596423 -20461115 DMCI HLDG 12.6 12.64 12.8 12.8 12.42 12.6 3779700 47262550 -1821190 FILINVEST DEV 9.85 9.92 9.8 9.95 9.66 9.9 1325700 13104148 -911100 FJ PRINCE A 4.11 5.1 7.1 7.1 6 6 11000 77000 GT CAPITAL 910 925 894 925 894 925 78580 72068395 -3525260 JG SUMMIT 49.4 50 49.15 50.2 49.05 50 571500 28395275 -13403860 LODESTAR 0.54 0.56 0.57 0.58 0.55 0.55 45000 25510 LOPEZ HLDG 4.06 4.15 4.17 4.17 4.02 4.15 530000 2155110 757370 LT GROUP 16.7 16.92 17.4 17.4 16.72 16.92 1835900 31110214 1630581.9996 MABUHAY HLDG 0.64 0.65 0.64 0.66 0.64 0.64 2870000 1855930 -321000 METRO PAC INV 4.76 4.77 4.76 4.78 4.68 4.77 23348000 110935300 -44254490 PACIFICA 0.036 0.038 0.038 0.038 0.037 0.037 10100000 374300 77700 PRIME ORION 2.37 2.39 2.39 2.39 2.36 2.37 170000 403380 -59500 PRIME MEDIA 1.23 1.25 1.17 1.26 1.17 1.25 173000 214780 REPUBLIC GLASS 2.6 2.69 2.6 2.6 2.6 2.6 5000 13000 SOLID GROUP 1.27 1.32 1.32 1.32 1.32 1.32 38000 50160 -18480 SYNERGY GRID 465.2 495 467 467 457 465 60 27800 SM INVESTMENTS 920.5 925 915 925 906.5 920.5 230410 211464225 -7514105 SAN MIGUEL CORP 154.9 155 157.1 161 155 155 920720 144380070 -91573852 SOC RESOURCES 0.74 0.77 0.74 0.74 0.74 0.74 11000 8140 TOP FRONTIER 273.6 280 280 280 280 280 91320 25569600 669200 WELLEX INDUS 0.25 0.255 0.255 0.26 0.248 0.25 6030000 1508370 ZEUS HLDG 0.196 0.225 0.227 0.227 0.227 0.227 10000 2270

PROPERTY ARTHALAND CORP 0.55 0.56 0.56 0.58 0.55 0.57 311000 174550 ANCHOR LAND 9.72 10.58 10.58 10.58 10.58 10.58 200 2116 AYALA LAND 41.2 42 40.55 42 40.55 42 6822000 282062985 18182625 ARANETA PROP 1.75 1.85 1.75 1.87 1.75 1.87 170000 308100 BELLE CORP 2.43 2.44 2.48 2.55 2.43 2.43 1909000 4708950 -2816020 A BROWN 0.75 0.76 0.74 0.76 0.74 0.76 234000 176480 20 CITYLAND DEVT 0.85 0.88 0.88 0.88 0.88 0.88 102000 89760 CROWN EQUITIES 0.248 0.25 0.255 0.255 0.243 0.25 11590000 2881830 1929850 CEBU HLDG 5.82 6 5.75 6 5.75 6 6000 34525 CEB LANDMASTERS 3.95 4 4.03 4.09 3.92 4.02 301000 1212170 -772310 CENTURY PROP 0.4 0.41 0.4 0.41 0.4 0.41 1120000 449650 72050 CYBER BAY 0.325 0.33 0.33 0.345 0.33 0.33 2270000 749900 -644150 DOUBLEDRAGON 17.54 17.56 17.5 17.72 17.5 17.56 65100 1145186 -68620.0002 DM WENCESLAO 7.99 8 8.05 8.05 7.99 8 150600 1204887 4025 EMPIRE EAST 0.475 0.48 0.48 0.48 0.48 0.48 20000 9600 FILINVEST LAND 1.45 1.46 1.45 1.47 1.45 1.46 10313000 15026770 -5817860 GLOBAL ESTATE 1.06 1.07 1.06 1.09 1.06 1.07 1455000 1546450 8990 HLDG 7.7 7.74 7.62 7.74 7.62 7.74 65500 502446 -91630 PHIL INFRADEV 2.41 2.43 2.33 2.46 2.25 2.43 17836000 42,739,700( 18,808,640.0002) CITY AND LAND 0.85 0.91 0.9 0.9 0.9 0.9 3000 2700 MEGAWORLD 4.79 4.8 4.75 4.84 4.73 4.8 14057000 67373860 -18327580 MRC ALLIED 0.4 0.405 0.4 0.405 0.39 0.4 24700000 9849800 -16000 PHIL ESTATES 0.46 0.475 0.465 0.465 0.465 0.465 430000 199950 PRIMEX CORP 3.6 3.62 3.74 3.74 3.6 3.6 758000 2737460 439200 ROBINSONS LAND 20.9 20.95 20.6 21.25 20.6 20.95 763800 16016590 -6446235 PHIL REALTY 0.38 0.39 0.38 0.39 0.38 0.39 40000 15300 ROCKWELL 2 2.02 2.02 2.03 1.98 2.01 18000 36190 SHANG PROP 3.07 3.12 3.12 3.12 3.07 3.08 28000 86930 -24650 STA LUCIA LAND 1.24 1.25 1.25 1.27 1.24 1.26 895000 1120400 177860 SM PRIME HLDG 35.45 35.5 35.45 35.75 35 35.5 9670000 342532890 -98902145 STARMALLS 5.35 5.36 5.41 5.47 5.31 5.36 190400 1022054 SUNTRUST HOME 0.73 0.74 0.73 0.73 0.73 0.73 50000 36500 PTFC REDEV CORP 29.2 37.85 30.2 30.2 29.2 29.2 200 5940 VISTA LAND 5.17 5.18 5.18 5.24 5.16 5.18 5275900 27371369 -7542449

SERVICES ABS CBN 19.38 19.5 19.68 19.68 19.4 19.5 40700 795634 GMA NETWORK 5.25 5.26 5.25 5.3 5.22 5.26 34800 182519 MLA BRDCASTING 16.22 17.88 16.22 16.22 16.22 16.22 100 1622 GLOBE TELECOM 2012 2020 2080 2100 2012 2012 29270 59587610 -11885370 PLDT 1139 1140 1165 1170 1140 1140 98690 113631235 -50643705 APOLLO GLOBAL 0.039 0.04 0.039 0.039 0.039 0.039 1000000 39000 IMPERIAL 1.9 1.95 1.97 1.97 1.97 1.97 11000 21670 3940 ISLAND INFO 0.106 0.108 0.106 0.111 0.105 0.106 3180000 340160 24380 ISM COMM 6.22 6.24 5.9 6.26 5.8 6.22 31707300 193018974 -5248848 JACKSTONES 3.15 3.38 3.43 3.43 3.14 3.39 8000 26010 NOW CORP 3.38 3.4 3.38 3.51 3.28 3.4 3128000 10498030 -304740 TRANSPACIFIC BR 0.41 0.415 0.405 0.42 0.39 0.41 52870000 21433350 -7587600 PHILWEB 3 3.07 2.96 3.07 2.95 3.07 273000 819270 115050 2GO GROUP 11.1 11.2 10.6 11.1 10.6 11.1 22000 242440 CEBU AIR 72.85 72.9 71.8 74.2 71.8 72.85 55880 4086034 971622 CHELSEA 6.62 6.65 6.5 6.85 6.5 6.62 3535800 23588472 -11360077 INTL CONTAINER 94.4 94.8 94.5 95.95 93.7 94.4 1217830 115572170 28531086.5 LBC EXPRESS 14.28 14.36 14.26 14.28 14.26 14.28 8100 115628 LORENZO SHIPPNG 0.75 0.78 0.79 0.79 0.75 0.75 4000 3040 MACROASIA 14.04 14.22 14.2 14.5 14.14 14.22 194000 2770688 -8594 METROALLIANCE A 2.14 2.15 2.1 2.19 2.08 2.15 736000 1563630 METROALLIANCE B 2.24 2.28 1.89 2.24 1.89 2.24 12000 26000 PAL HLDG 8.2 8.25 8.25 8.25 8.25 8.25 1600 13200 HARBOR STAR 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.12 3 3.04 1730000 5312390 -3040 ACESITE HOTEL 1.46 1.56 1.32 1.57 1.26 1.46 3846000 4957190 DISCOVERY WORLD 2.2 2.4 2.4 2.4 2.4 2.4 4000 9600 WATERFRONT 0.64 0.67 0.65 0.67 0.64 0.64 2317000 1501570 CENTRO ESCOLAR 7.71 7.93 7.6 7.9 7.6 7.9 106400 809540 IPEOPLE 10.26 11.58 11.58 11.58 11.58 11.58 100 1158 STI HLDG 0.61 0.62 0.62 0.62 0.6 0.61 17921000 10857740 -6484030 BERJAYA 2.97 2.98 2.74 2.98 2.7 2.97 10933000 30974570 -39360 BLOOMBERRY 7.99 8.02 7.85 8.05 7.84 7.99 5918000 47215280 -10250607 PACIFIC ONLINE 9.9 10.3 10 10 10 10 5000 50000 LEISURE AND RES 3.41 3.43 3.55 3.6 3.41 3.42 562000 1960270 214030 MANILA JOCKEY 5.25 5.48 5.5 5.5 5.48 5.48 17600 96614 PREMIUM LEISURE 0.84 0.85 0.83 0.89 0.83 0.85 13716000 11826610 88160 TRAVELLERS 5.26 5.27 5.27 5.28 5.24 5.27 583200 3070248 -1183449 METRO RETAIL 2.15 2.18 2.17 2.19 2.15 2.18 790000 1712500 -39050 PUREGOLD 42.35 42.5 42.65 42.65 42.25 42.5 1303700 55396510 -20028410 ROBINSONS RTL 74.1 76 73.2 76 73.05 76 391990 29111116.5 6168933 PHIL SEVEN CORP 111.6 114.4 115.8 115.9 110.5 114.4 166430 18509540 -150224 SSI GROUP 2.39 2.4 2.4 2.45 2.38 2.4 1450000 3477530 -775280 WILCON DEPOT 11.8 11.82 11.84 11.9 11.82 11.82 540100 6387456 -3550080 APC GROUP 0.42 0.425 0.405 0.435 0.405 0.425 3300000 1402550 EASYCALL 19.42 19.44 20.5 21.35 19.44 19.44 692800 13864235 44099 GOLDEN BRIA 314.4 325 325 325 316.2 325 3090 1003984 16250 IPM HLDG 7.18 7.2 7.2 7.2 7.2 7.2 12500 90000 PAXYS 3.11 3.4 3.39 3.4 3.38 3.4 79000 268410 PRMIERE HORIZON 0.31 0.315 0.315 0.315 0.315 0.315 60000 18900 SBS PHIL CORP 7.15 7.49 7.05 7.7 6.95 7.5 524800 3688565

MINING & OIL ATOK 15.6 16.58 16.7 16.7 15.8 16.68 5700 90452 APEX MINING 1.61 1.62 1.6 1.62 1.59 1.62 1143000 1839480 ABRA MINING 0.0019 0.002 0.002 0.002 0.002 0.002 10000000 20000 ATLAS MINING 2.52 2.79 2.51 2.52 2.51 2.52 163000 410020 -20120 BENGUET A 1.13 1.23 1.13 1.2 1.13 1.2 23000 27390 COAL ASIA HLDG 0.29 0.3 0.29 0.29 0.29 0.29 10000 2900 2900 CENTURY PEAK 1.92 1.93 1.91 1.93 1.91 1.93 500000 962000 DIZON MINES 7 7.01 7.2 7.2 7.01 7.01 6500 45614 FERRONICKEL 1.68 1.69 1.69 1.69 1.64 1.69 1364000 2281580 9500 GEOGRACE 0.201 0.204 0.202 0.203 0.202 0.203 50000 10110 LEPANTO A 0.1 0.101 0.099 0.1 0.098 0.1 790000 78740 LEPANTO B 0.101 0.109 0.108 0.109 0.108 0.109 60000 6490 NIHAO 1.05 1.08 1.11 1.11 1.08 1.08 2000 2190 NICKEL ASIA 2.15 2.17 2.1 2.17 2.1 2.15 3064000 6561230 -2711820 OMICO CORP 0.56 0.62 0.55 0.6 0.55 0.6 126000 75510 ORNTL PENINSULA 0.96 0.98 0.99 0.99 0.96 0.97 789000 763980 2910 PX MINING 2.69 2.7 2.74 2.75 2.66 2.7 1271000 3431610 SEMIRARA MINING 24.45 24.5 24.7 24.7 24.2 24.5 2117500 51734335 -15571915 ORNTL PETROL A 0.012 0.013 0.012 0.012 0.012 0.012 25800000 309600 ORNTL PETROL B 0.012 0.013 0.012 0.012 0.012 0.012 200000 2400 PHILODRILL 0.012 0.013 0.012 0.012 0.012 0.012 3800000 45600 PHINMA PETRO 3.24 3.4 3.41 3.41 3.41 3.41 13000 44330 PXP ENERGY 15.38 15.4 15.4 15.8 15.38 15.4 1007600 15643880 -3178374

PREFFERED AC PREF B1 AC PREF B2 FGEN PREF G GLO PREF P GTCAP PREF A LR PREF MWIDE PREF PCOR PREF 2B SMC PREF 2B SMC PREF 2C SMC PREF 2E SMC PREF 2F SMC PREF 2G SMC PREF 2I

455.2 475 101 460.2 871 1 99 970 75.2 76.35 73 74.5 74 73.3

PHIL. DEPOSITARY RECEIPTS ABS HLDG PDR

18.5

469 490 103 479 934.5 1.02 101.3 1000 75.3 76.6 74 75 74.5 74.8

460 490 101.7 461.2 852.5 1.02 101.4 1000 75.9 76.4 72.05 74.65 74.5 74.8

460 490 101.7 461.2 935 1.02 101.5 1000 75.9 76.4 74 75 74.5 74.8

455 476 101 460 852.5 1.02 99 1000 75.3 76.35 72.05 74.5 74.5 74.8

455 490 101 460 935 1.02 99 1000 75.3 76.35 74 75 74.5 74.8

4000 560 8000 3500 600 6000 10700 10 1410 16260 280500 7650 10000 10

1824280 267400 808220 1612304 552750 6120 1060590 10000 106738 1241999 20211000 570325 745000 748

-808220 49550 745000 -

19

18.58

18.7

18.5

18.5

79500

1,473,730(

1,074,659.9994)

WARRANTS LR WARRANT

2

SMALL & MEDIUM ENTERPRISES ITALPINAS 4.37 XURPAS 1.23

2.05

2.06

2.15

2

2

132000

268730

-

4.4 1.24

4.35 1.2

4.5 1.25

4.35 1.2

4.37 1.23

131000 1878000

576700 2295110

-26360 -489000

EXHANGE TRADE FUNDS FIRST METRO ETF

110.5

110.9

110.3

111.1

110.3

110.5

4530

501127

3330

Editor: Efleda P. Campos

House panel okays transfer of MIT control to Uy’s group

By Bernadette D. Nicolas

T

@BNicolasBM

HE House panel adopted on Tuesday the concurrent resolution approving the transfer, sale or assignment of the controlling interest of Mindanao Islamic Telephone Co. Inc. to the Udenna Corp., Chelsea Logistics Holdings Corp. and China Telecom.

This was after the Mislatel Consortium, composed of Mislatel, Udenna and China Telecom, won the bid to become the third major telco, which is expected to break the duopoly in the industry.

Quirino Rep. Dakila Carlo E. Cua, a member of the committee on legislative franchise, filed the House resolution.

“Whereas, in accordance with the Binding Bidding Agreement duly executed by and among Mislatel, Udenna, Chelsea and China Telecom dated November 6, 2018, and in compliance with the requirements of the National Telecommunications

Commission Memorandum Circular 09-09-2018 or the Rules and Regulations on the Selection Process for a New Major Player in the Philippine Telecommunications Market, Udenna, Chelsea and China Telecom will subscribe into the increase in shareholdings of Mislatel, which would result in Udenna, Chelsea and China Telecom owning majority and controlling interest in Mislatel,” the resolution read.

Udenna Corp., Chelsea Logistics Holdings Corp. and China Telecom Corp. Ltd. tapped Mislatel for the use of its congressional franchise for the third telco bidding.

CMP taps EDC to supply 2.5 MW of power to Tanauan, Batangas site

T

HE Citizen Machinery Philippines Inc. (CMP) has tapped the Energy Development Corp. (EDC) to supply 2.5 megawatts (MW) of power to the manufacturing company in Tanauan, Batangas.

Both signed a two-year power supply agreement with EDC supplying CMP of geothermal power from EDC’s BacMan Geothermal Project. The deal takes effect on December 26.

“As a manufacturing company, Citizen Machinery Philippines desires to be supplied by stable and low-cost electricity, especially since our foundry consumes much power,” CMP President Akihide Kanaya said.

“EDC’s BacMan Geothermal Project meets these criteria. At the same time, we remain committed to give our customers the highest level of satisfaction possible. This includes

making sustainable contributions to society through innovative manufacturing solutions, while recognizing our impact to the environment.

Choosing to be powered by 100-percent renewable energy strongly supports this commitment.”

CMP manufactures and assembles automatic lathe machines, which produces other machines for use in different industries.

The EDC is one of the world’s largest geothermal producers and the country’s leading renewableenergy company with an installed capacity of 1,471.8 MW. For over 40 years, EDC has been implementing comprehensive environmental management programs that enhance the ecosystem and corporate social responsibility programs that ensure inclusive growth for its partner communities. Lenie Lectura

Longest-serving UK courier company launches eco-friendly vehicles

L

ONDON—Absolutely—one of the UK’s longest-established courier companies, has added to their fleet with the launch of new electric-cargo vehicles.

In order to ensure compliance with the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), as well as the petrol and diesel car ban in specific parts of east London, the new fleet of vehicles will enable Absolutely to continue delivering an excellent standard of service, whilst adhering to the latest legislation.

At present, one of the most significant issues facing the courier industry is the introduction of the ULEZ in April 2019. In order to reduce the levels of carbon emissions and toxic gases around, the ULEZ will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week and set a daily charge for vehicles failing to meet

the emissions standards. This will be in addition to the weekday congestion charge and the Low Emission Zone charge.

The launch of the electric vehicles—a first for Absolutely—is an innovative and industry leading move as it is environmentally friendly.

With their zero carbon emissions, the vehicles will be eligible to travel within the upcoming zone. This will enable Absolutely to continuously provide an excellent standard of service for which they are known for.

A long w it h t he electr ic vans, Absolutely will introduce a new set of electric cargo bicycles which will facilitate deliveries within the congested City and West End areas and offer improved efficiency for their customers. AP

In an interview with reporters, Cua welcomed the adoption, saying Mislatel consortium followed the right process and asked for the approval of the Congress.

Although he said there were some parties who are questioning the decision of the committee, Cua said it is now out of their hands to thresh out these issues.

“That is not part of the responsibility of the committee to decide who should be the partner.… What was supposed to be done by the committee was to accept the documents… and check if these people are qualified…and if there are no laws which were violated,” he said. “If everything is okay, then the committee will recommend its approval to the plenary.”

However, Dennis Manalo, lawyer of DigiPhil, said there might be a problem with the Committee’s approval, since it might be in conflict with the court decision.

DigiPhil, a subsidiary of Chavit Singson’s Sear Telecom, participated in the bid for the third telco slot.

Manalo explained the investment opportunity should first be offered to them because they have an earlier agreement with Mislatel.

“With the approval of Mislatel, what will happen now if the court in Pasig and if [the] issue goes up

MUTUAL FUNDS

at the Supreme Court [and] affirms the right of first refusal of DigiPhil?

What will happen now to the approval of Congress? There will now be a conflict scenario here,” Manalo said.

Under the agreement of DigiPhil and Mislatel, DigiPhil bought 2.5 million shares in Mislatel for P5 million.

It also bore an exclusivity clause, which read that “Mislatel warrants and represents that DigiPhil and/or DigiPhil nominated partners or business associates will be Mislatel’s sole and exclusive partner in the utilization of frequencies, permits, licenses or authorizations that may be approved through the applications or petitions mentioned herein.”

The contract also prohibited Mislatel from entering into partnerships with other companies for the same contract.

However, the camp of Davaobased businessman Dennis A. Uy, owner of both Udenna and Chelsea, has since said that Mislatel’s deal with DigiPhil is limited to “small projects like very small aperture terminal technology.”

Moreover, Mislatel’s legal counsel John D. Caluso also said the deal has been terminated due to DigiPhil’s alleged “fraudulent misrepresentation” on the terms of the contract.

December 11, 2018

NAV ONE YEAR THREE YEAR FIVE YEAR Y-T-D

PER SHARE RETURN* RETURN STOCK FUNDS ALFM GROWTH FUND, INC * 249.03 -12.62% 0.82% 2.58% -15.06% ATRAM ALPHA OPPORTUNITY FUND, INC.* 1.3795 -12.61% 5.62% 2.76% -13.61% ATRAM PHILIPPINE EQUITY OPPORTUNITY FUND, INC.* 3.8356 -14.07% 1.9% 1.07% -16.48% CLIMBS SHARE CAPITAL EQUITY INVESTMENT FUND CORP.* 0.8826 -12.73% N.A. N.A. -13.22% FIRST METRO CONSUMER FUND ON MSCI PHILS. IMI, INC. * ********* 0.8159 N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. FIRST METRO SAVE AND LEARN EQUITY FUND,INC.* 5.1554 -12.41% -0.45% 1.82% -14.26% MBG EQUITY INVESTMENT FUND, INC. * ****** 114.39 N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. ONE WEALTHY NATION FUND, INC.* 0.8219 -15.86% N.A. N.A. -17.21% PAMI EQUITY INDEX FUND, INC.* 48.474 -11.41% 1.78% N.A. -14.04% PHILAM STRATEGIC GROWTH FUND, INC.* 507.46 -11.29% 0.61% 2.01% -13.76% PHILEQUITY DIVIDEND YIELD FUND, INC.* 1.2428 -9.27% 2.39% N.A. -11.5% PHILEQUITY FUND, INC.* 36.1852 -9.75% 2.85% 4.66% -11.95% PHILEQUITY PSE INDEX FUND INC.* 4.8826 -11.31% 2.54% 4.37% -13.95% PHILIPPINE STOCK INDEX FUND CORP.* 815.57 -11.14% 2.35% 4.48% -13.76% SOLDIVO STRATEGIC GROWTH FUND, INC. * 0.8494 -9.83% 0.14% N.A. -12.17% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY PHILIPPINE EQUITY FUND, INC.* 4.0244 -9.71% 2.3% 2.84% -12.13% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY PHILIPPINE STOCK INDEX FUND, INC.* 0.9398 -11.47% 2.34% N.A. -14.04% UNITED FUND, INC.* 3.4624 -8.31% 3.81% 3.53% -11.09% EXCHANGE TRADED FUND FIRST METRO PHIL. EQUITY EXCHANGE TRADED FUND, INC.* ***109.0064 -10.81% 3.51% N.A. -13.46% ATRAM ASIAPLUS EQUITY FUND, INC.** $0.9349 -12.9% 2.03% -0.74% -15.65% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY WORLD VOYAGER FUND, INC.* $1.1792 -4.9% N.A. N.A. -6.8% BALANCED FUNDS PRIMARILY INVESTED IN PESO SECURITIES ATRAM DYNAMIC ALLOCATION FUND, INC.* 1.6402 -10.11% -1.36% -1.07% -11.98% ATRAM PHILIPPINE BALANCED FUND, INC.* 2.1824 -9.65% 1.02% 0.86% -11.18% FIRST METRO SAVE AND LEARN BALANCED FUND INC.* 2.4993 -8.43% -2.39% -1.41% -9.77% GREPALIFE BALANCED FUND CORPORATION* **** 1.296 -9.47% N.A. N.A. -10.92% NCM MUTUAL FUND OF THE PHILS., INC* 1.8295 -6.26% 1.05% 2.23% -8.18% PAMI HORIZON FUND, INC.* 3.5053 -8.91% -0.11% 1.44% -10.54% PHILAM FUND, INC.* 15.7722 -8.52% -0.09% 1.27% -10.17% SOLIDARITAS FUND, INC.* ******** 2.0473 -7.27% 1.07% 2.55% -8.69% SUN LIFE OF CANADA PROSPERITY BALANCED FUND, INC.* 3.6327 -7.45% 0.84% 1.36% -9.1% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY DYNAMIC FUND, INC.* 0.9201 -7.87% 0.08% N.A. -9.82% PRIMARILY INVESTED IN FOREIGN CURRENCY SECURITIES COCOLIFE DOLLAR FUND BUILDER, INC.* $0.03497 -3.24% -0.44% 1.45% -3.13% PAMI ASIA BALANCED FUND, INC.* $0.9426 -8.23% 2.36% -1.31% -9.97% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY DOLLAR ADVANTAGE FUND, INC.* $3.4563 -3.95% 3.52% 1.79% -5.37% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY DOLLAR WELLSPRING FUND, INC.* $1.0311 -6.6% N.A. N.A. -7.29% BOND FUNDS PRIMARILY INVESTED IN PESO SECURITIES ALFM PESO BOND FUND, INC.* 342.76 1.83% 2.09% 1.77% 1.68% ATRAM CORPORATE BOND FUND, INC.* ******* 1.8464 -2.31% -0.84% -0.71% -2.43% COCOLIFE FIXED INCOME FUND, INC.* 2.9627 5.46% 5.33% 5.25% 4.99% EKKLESIA MUTUAL FUND INC.* 2.1289 1.25% 1.63% 1.31% 1.27% FIRST METRO SAVE AND LEARN FIXED INCOME FUND,INC.* 2.2068 - 0.32% 0.12% 0.24% -0.42% GREPALIFE FIXED INCOME FUND CORP.* P 1.5652 -2.86% -0.27% -1.09% -2.75% PHILAM BOND FUND, INC.* 3.9129 -3.54% -0.35% -0.23% -3.39% PHILEQUITY PESO BOND FUND, INC.* 3.4912 0.06% 0.87% 0.12% -0.39% SOLDIVO BOND FUND, INC. * 0.8916 -3.34% -0.81% N.A. -3.42% SUN LIFE OF CANADA PROSPERITY BOND FUND, INC.* 2.7668 -0.46% 1.39% 0.51% -0.37% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY GS FUND, INC.* 1.539 -0.74% 1.05% 0.04% -0.69% PRIMARILY INVESTED IN FOREIGN CURRENCY SECURITIES ALFM DOLLAR BOND FUND, INC. * $447.58 0.49% 2.29% 3.07% 0.37% ALFM EURO BOND FUND, INC. * Є212.34 -0.82% 0.96% 1.58% -0.65% ATRAM TOTAL RETURN DOLLAR BOND FUND, INC.** $1.124 -0.92% 0.88% 1.89% -0.89% FIRST METRO SAVE AND LEARN DOLLAR BOND FUND, INC.* $0.0249 - 0.4% 0.82% N.A. -0.4% GREPALIFE DOLLAR BOND FUND CORP.* $1.6886 -4.72% -0.44% 1.13% -4.68% MAA PRIVILEGE DOLLAR FIXED INCOME FUND, INC. N.S. N.S. N.S. N.S. N.S. MAA PRIVILEGE EURO FIXED INCOME FUND, INC. ЄN.S. N.S. N.S. N.S. N.S. PAMI GLOBAL BOND FUND, INC* $1.0304 -4.44% -0.85% -2.52% -4.01% PHILAM DOLLAR BOND FUND, INC.* $2.1549 -4.11% 0.65% 2.52% -4.27% PHILEQUITY DOLLAR INCOME FUND INC.* $0.0569652 -0.82% 0.88% 1.85% -0.41% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY DOLLAR ABUNDANCE FUND, INC.* $2.8701 -4.7% 0.36% 1.66% -4.74% MONEY MARKET FUNDS PRIMARILY INVESTED IN PESO SECURITIES ALFM MONEY MARKET FUND, INC.* 120.57 2.63% 1.82% 1.53% 2.52% PHILAM MANAGED INCOME FUND, INC.* 1.1796 1.94% 0.59% 0.47% 1.92% SUN LIFE PROSPERITY MONEY MARKET FUND, INC.* 1.2165 2.61% 2.23% 1.53% 2.61% PRIMARILY INVESTED IN FOREIGN CURRENCY SECURITIES SUN LIFE PROSPERITY DOLLAR STARTER FUND, INC.* ***** $1.0151 1.61% N.A. N.A. 1.64%

* - NAVPS AS OF THE PREVIOUS BANKING DAY ** - NAVPS AS OF TWO BANKING DAYS AGO *** - LISTED IN THE PSE.

**** - RE-CLASSIFIED INTO A BALANCED FUND STARTING JANUARY 1, 2017 (FORMERLY GREPALIFE BOND FUND CORP.).

***** - LAUNCH DATE IS NOVEMBER 6, 2017 ****** - LAUNCH DATE IS JANUARY 08, 2018 ******** - RENAMING OF THE FUND WAS APPROVED BY THE SEC LAST APRIL 13, 2018. ********* - BECAME A MEMBER SINCE APRIL 20, 2018. ******* - ADJUSTED DUE TO CASH DIVIDEND ISSUANCE LAST JANUARY 29, 2018

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Banking&Finance BusinessMirror

Treasury awards full P15 billion at auction for reissued T-bonds

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HE Bureau of the Treasury (BTr) awarded the full P15 billion on offer for the sevenyear reissued Treasury bonds (T-bonds) on Tuesday, with the auction committee opening its tap facility anew to accommodate the oversubscription.

National Treasurer Rosalia V. de Leon said the auction committee decided to fully award the reissued T-bonds, seeing strong liquidit y from the local market as bids reached as much as P29.920 billion.

The committee awarded the bonds on offer at an average annual rate of 7.090 percent—an increase of 11.6 basis points com-

pared to the 6.974-percent rate set in the previous auction for the IOU. The strong demand coming in from local investors prompted the BTr to open its tap facility anew, marking the fourth time this year the BTr used this facility.

“It’s like we also did an RTB [retail Treasury bond issuance], and it’s good because we’re even

getting longer [maturity],” de Leon said. “We have the option to upsize the amount offered.

T hey’re rea l ly loc k ing in t he rates, anticipating that next year, eventually, inf lation would be tapering off.”

At the previous auction for the seven-year T-bonds on November 27, the auction committee received tenders amounting to P62.227 billion, with the BTr also awarding the full P15 billion on offer at an average annual rate of 6.974 percent.

The BTr also opened its tap facility at that auction. To note, the BTr awarded P15 billion for fiveyear T-bonds during the first time it opened the facility this year.

“So far, it’s P15 billion, P15 billion, P23 billion; plus whatever we award today,” de Leon said. “It’s like we also issued an RTB. And its maturity is longer.”

The third time the tap facility was opened, de Leon said the

Crypto die-hards believe slump ‘bump in the road’ before growth

Renato A. Claravall named new Veterans Bank president

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HE Board of Directors of Philippine Veterans Bank ( P V B) ap pro ve d t he ap pointment of Renato A. Claravall as its new president and chief operating officer effective December 1. Claravall has been a director of PVB since 2015. Prior to this, he held several executive positions in Benguet Corp.—as senior vice president and chief finance officer from 2010 to 2015—and as director in its various wholly owned companies.

His d ist ing u ished ca reer in bank ing and finance spans 45 years in both commercial and investment banking, including various senior management positions in several financial institutions both locally and abroad.

He is also a member of the Sons & Daughters Association Inc. being the son of World War II veteran Juan J. Claravall.

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HE future of cryptocurrencies will entail greater regulation, more involvement by large institutions, lower volatility and greater integration with traditional assets.

That’s according to panelists at the Bloomberg Crypto Summit held in London on Friday.

The summit convened at the end of the bloodiest year yet for the nascent crypto market, in which more than $700 billion has been lost, to assess the damage and look ahead to 2019.

While no one forecast an immediate rebound in crypto prices—Bitcoin has lost about 80 percent of its value this year—they cast the current downturn as more like growing pains than rigor mortis. In fact, two areas of growth for the industry will come from low-volatility tokens known as stable coins and so-called

Drones are changing people’s lives

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NDEED, we live in the 4th i ndu st r i a l re volut ion to day. Many changes will occur in the way we do things because of technology.

For instance, artificial intelligence and automation now combi ne to produce d rones.

They are flying machines controlled by radio gadgets from below which can be used by hobbyists, the military and for commercial purposes.

For hobbyists—the most popular use is to have aerial shots of one’s group taken or take a panoramic view of the terrain one is in like mountains, valleys and seas like one had his own camera plane.

They are not allowed to be used during nighttime, near populated areas like schools and marketplace, nor to be flown above 400 feet, and must be 10 kilometers away from airports. If one uses them for commercial purposes, one must get permission from the the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines.

Worldwide, the drone’s popularity has surged that they now count 3 million users (as of 2017), and by 2021, we could see “air traffic” with the projected usage of 30 million drones in the world.

Time Magazine had a special issue on “The Age of the Drones” and cited their many uses.

BTr had the discretion to cap the awarded amount at a level the bureau deems fit. Previously, the awarded amount under the tap facility was only based on the same amount awarded during the auction for the security before opening the tap facility on the same day.

The Treasury’s 10 market makers are the only ones that can access the tap facility, which was open from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday.

The tap facility allows Government Securities Eligible Dealers to access bonds after the initial primary auction.

The 10 market makers are BDO Unibank Inc., Bank of the Philippine Islands, China Banking Corp., Citibank Philippines, Development Bank of the Philippines, First Metro Investment Corp., Land Bank of the Philippines, Metropolitan Bank and Trust Co., Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. and Security Bank Corp. Rea Cu

FINEX FREE ENTERPRISE

Zoilo ‘Bingo’ Dejaresco III Militarily, the United States has used drones (since the time of Obama) to scout and target high-value enemies in Afghanistan, while the ISIS had dropped crude bombs on allied troops in Iraq and Syria using drones.

The drone war has escalated since drones achieve military objectives with no human casualty on the offensive side, much like sending Robocops to wage battle in the fields. It is for this reason that the Pentagon is reportedly set to spend $400 million in research for counter-drone mechanisms.

Drones can also be used for bad ends, as in the case of convicted kidnapper Jimmy Causey of South Carolina, whose allies sent a drone to drop two wire cutters into the prison compound and allowed him to escape prison—at least temporarily.

Still, there are far more beneficial uses for drones than bad.

For instance, when Hurricane Maria cut off all communications in Puerto Rico, AT&T sent off a giant Flying COW—a drone in the sky that set off mobile data signal

40 miles in all directions—negating the need for the damaged land-based mobile towers.

In Africa, a man badly needing an O+ blood type got his package in six minutes dropped from a drone via a small parachute—in what would have taken six hours by a land trip.

Operation zipline in Rwand a d id it s f i rst com merc i a l d rone f l i g ht c a r r y i ng me di c a l s u p p l i e s a nd b l o o d t o far-flung areas.

The drone is very helpful in the field of movie-making, where the best aerial shots can be achieved at the least cost.

Drones were extensively used to shoot scenes f rom James Bond’s Skyfall, Jurassic Park and the sci-fi film Black Mirror.

Using the traditional helicopters would have cost Hollywood from $20,000 to $40,000 per 10hour shoot. Drones can be had for as low as $4,000 to $13,000 for a whole-day shooting. And with no risk to pilots and crew on helicopters.

Even in the Philippines, inventors are riding on the worldwide craze to innovate. For instance, former dancer and camera operator Kyxz Mendiola—using the “multicopter technology”—has invented what she calls a “flying sports car” drone.

The air drone can seat one person (up to 220 pounds including

security tokens, digital contracts that represent ownership of assets such as real estate or stocks.

“I don’t regard this as an existential crisis, I just regard it as a bump in the road and institutional investors have had plenty of bumps in the road in conventional currencies and transaction systems,” James Bevan, chief investment officer at CCLA Investment Management, said on a panel.

One of the hottest crazes in the world of crypto this year, stable coins, still has plenty of room to run said Lewis Fellas, chief investment officer at crypto fund Bletchley Park Asset Management. While some estimates put the number of projects in development at as many as 120 we are only in the early innings of the proliferation, Fellas said.

“I think we’re just getting started,” Fellas said. “I can see a huge expansion.” Bloomberg News

the drone and accessories), can fly over 20 feet at 67 kilometers per hour, powered by six lithium batteries with portable radio frequency controller.

Star8, Australia’s technology company, is eager to perfect the prototype with Mendiola as this will revolutionize travel in Manila, where traffic is crazy. Mendiola’s drone can navigate for one passenger in just five minutes a distance that normally would have taken an hour. Wow. Yes, guys, this is the New World coming to your doorsteps w it h incred ible speed. A nd guess who controls the drone global trade?

It is a Chinese company based in Shenzhen which controls 75 percent of the drone technology production in the world. This is not a wonder.

A recent article indicated that it has become a national policy of China to appoint engineers and scientists to key government posts—to better take advantage of the trends in this 4th Industrial Revolution.

For a start, Chinese President Xi Jimping is an engineer. This brings out a negative case for the Philippines, where Philippine democracy has produced more than its just share of lawyers as presidents.

We had better read the handwriting on the wall.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

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Moody’s sees stable outlook for Aspac insurance growth

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OODY’S Investor Service sees a stable outlook for 2019 for the life and property and casualty insurance industry in the AsiaPacific (Aspac) region, despite the emergence of asset risks.

Based on a report by the Moody’s Investor Service released on Tuesday, its outlook for t he i n su ra nce i ndu st r y within the region for next year is stable, brought about by the strong capital levels and improving product mixes.

“Economic growth among Aspac economies will moderate but continue. This plus their aging populations will support growing demand for long-term investment, health and retirement coverage,” Frank Yuen, Moody’s assistant vice president and analyst, was quoted in a statement as saying.

The report said it sees longter m life-insurance demand w ithin the countr ies in the remaining strong. The strong d e m a n d , M o o d y ’s s a i d , i s backed by a growing middle class, as well as a significant protection gap.

However, these countries will see a slowdown in life premium growth early on as insurers would still adjust their product mixes in line with keeping up with regulatory requirements, the report said.

In terms of the property and casualty insurance sector, premium growth in Aspac remains to be robust and continues to

exceed that of neighboring countries on the back of the region’s economic growth, increasing wealth and the need to build infrastructure, Moody’s added.

The emergence of rising asset risks were pointed out to be coming from increasing allocations to higher-yielding nontraditional assets and widening currency mismatches, which will put some pressure in line with the investment performance of insurance companies in the Aspac.

“Given t he l i ke l i hood of more volatile economic and capital markets developments in 2019, the investment perfor mance of A spac insurers will experience pressure,” the report mentioned.

Still, Moody’s said the insurance industry will be strengthened further, helping it absorb shocks through the tightening requirements for capital and asset liability management coming from the regulators’ side.

Moody’s said insurers in the Aspac are now stepping up their efforts to improve asset-liability management and internal risk management, and embed capital analysis in their daily product offerings and asset allocation decisions.

It also said that insurers should be more adept with incorporating technology in their respective business models as technolog ica l advancements is seen to gradually reshape how the insurance industr y works. Rea Cu

Case clippings

By Justice S J Ranada Jr. OBITER DICTUM–definition and concept An obiter dictum is an opinion of the court upon a question which was not necessary to the decision of the case before it. It is an opinion uttered by the way, not upon the point or question pending, as if turning away aside from the main topic of the case to collateral subjects, or an opinion that does not embody the court’s determination, and is made without argument or full consideration of the point.

Saludo v PNB 20 August 2018

GR 193138 Jardeleza, J

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GLOBE TELECOM AMONG 50 BEST IN ASEAN CORPORATE GOVERNANCE VIVO IS NBA’S MULTIYEAR PARTNER IN PHILIPPINES

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HE National Basketball Association (NBA) and leading smartphone manufacturer Vivo closed a multiyear marketing partnership, signaling the latter as the official smartphone of the NBA in the Philippines.

NBA a nd seven-t ime A l l- St a r champion Alonzo Mourning, along with NBA Philippines managing director Carlo Singson and Vivo Philippines Chief Executive Director Ted Xiong, led the briefing at the Sofitel Harbon garden tent.

Throughout the partnership, Vivo will be the presenting partner of the

NBA Playoffs bracket challenge, a fancy basketball game that allows participants to hand in their NBA Playoffs predictions. As an official partner of the junior NBA in the Philippines and NBA 3X Philippines, Vivo leverages the league’s youth platforms to stage interactive fan activities and showcase its latest mobile devices. In addition, Vivo will be integrated into content on NBA Facebook, including select game highlights, vignettes and photos.

“We are excited to partner with the NBA, [which] shares our core values

of teamwork, respect and community [engagement],” X iong said. “ T he popularity of the NBA will enhance our brand image and [enable to] introduce our mobile devices to more users, and we look forward to working with the league to create experiences for fans to enjoy the game.”

Mourning was selected second overall by the Charlotte Hornets in the 1992 NBA Draft and named to the NBA All-Rookie First Team in 1993. A one-time NBA champion with the Miami Heat, Mourning played 15 seasons in the NBA with career averages of 17.1 points, 8.5 rebounds and 2.8 blocks, which led to two Defensive Player of the Year awards and two AllNBA and All-Defensive team selections.

In 2014 he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

The junior NBA, the league’s global youth basketball participation program for boys and girls, teaches fundamental skills and core values of the game at the grassroots level, in an effort to enhance the youth basketball experience. Since its launch in 2007, the junior NBA Philippines program has reached more than 1.7 million players, parents and coaches nationwide. The NBA 3X has been staged in the Philippines since 2011, showcasing three-on-three competition featur ing men’s and women’s teams combined with an authentic NBA entertainment.

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LOBE Telecom made it to the top 50 publicly listed companies (PLCs) in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) for excellent performance in the Asean corporate governance scorecard (ACGS). This is a testament to the company’s commitment to good governance, to create shared value for all stakeholders.

The prestigious award was conferred by the Asean capital markets’ forum at the Asean Corporate Governance Awards ceremony held on November 21 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The ACGS assessed close to 600 PLCs for their corporate-governance practices, which aim to protect their firms from financial crises and promote greater capital-market development.

“The key is finding the equilibrium between governance and business. We believe that finding the right balance is the crux to sustainability and shareholder value,” said Marisalve Ciocson-Co, Globe senior vice president for law and compliance, chief compliance officer and assistant corporate secretary.

The ACGS is an instrument for the assessment and ranking of PLCs among participating countries, namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. This initiative was

developed in 2011 by the ACMF, in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank. The scorecard is also aligned with the corporate governance principles by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Assessment of listed firms under ACGS underwent a rigorous two-stage process: Local assessment conducted by domestic ranking body (DRB) assessing and ranking their respective Philippine listed firms, as well as a peer review by other DRBs assessing listed companies from other countries. This is then followed by a series of dialogues and discussions among DRBs and the ACGS working group to reconcile differences and discrepancies in assessments and scores.

Globe has been consistently recognized as one of the top listed firms in Asean since the 2015 ACGS run.

ACGS compliance is spearheaded by Ciocson-Co. Other companies recognized in the Top 50 were Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (Singtel), Ayala Corp., Ayala Land Inc. and Manila Water Co. Inc. Ciocson-Co (third to the right) receives the award for Globe at the Second Asean Corporate Governance Awards Ceremony at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center in Malaysia.

A CENTENNIAL OF HUMANISTIC EDUCATION In photo is Jose Victor Jimenez delivering an overview on the 100 years of the liberal arts program held at the Venture, Henry Sy Sr. Hall, of De La Salle University, celebrating a centennial of humanistic education through the ages. ROY DOMINGO

A NIGHT OF ‘SEASONS’ WITH JAIME RIVERA

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HE Philippines’s “Inspirational Diva” Jamie Rivera headlines a musical night held in Binondo, Manila, on November 30.

Titled “Seasons: A Musical Night”, a fund-raising concert that includes performances by the Rosa Mystica Choir and Anne Tenorio, guests witnessed how the school chapel was transformed into a concert hall overnight. It was the first biggest concert production held at Our Lady of The Most Holy Rosary (Binondo Chinese Parish) in Ongpin,

Manila. The concert was highlighted with favorite classic hits by Rivera, along with a special tribute to the teachers.

The show was directed by Neil Maristela and handled by Kathy Guillermo of Imagik Events.

With the support from sponsors, alumni and people from the community, Seasons: A Musical Night was presented

by Lorenzo Ruiz Academy Alumni Batch 1988 celebrating its 30th year, headed by Victor Chua, Principal Evelyn Lagamayo and Dra. Nora Lee.

LESSONS Sports LEARNED BusinessMirror

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| Wednesday, December 12, 2018 mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph Editor: Jun Lomibao

By Tales Azzoni The Associated Press

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RIVER PLATE’S Enzo Perez celebrates in Madrid as fans hide from the police at the Obelisk in Buenos Aires on Sunday. AP

ADRID—The Copa Libertadores finally came to a conclusion, without incident.

River Plate fans peacefully celebrated the team’s triumph over Boca Juniors as the city of Madrid showed it is possible to successfully organize the high-profile game between two of the

There were doubts the happy ending at Santiago Bernabeu Stadium would prompt many changes after one of the greatest debacles in South American soccer history.

South American continent’s fiercest rivals.

But there were doubts the happy ending at Santiago Bernabeu Stadium would prompt many changes after one of the greatest debacles in South American soccer history.

“To be honest, sometimes it seems like we are incapable of learning,” Boca Juniors Coach Guillermo Barros Schelotto said. “I don’t think we will be able to take much from what happened in this stadium, from how the fans behaved here.

Hopefully we will learn a lot, but it seems like we are incapable of learning. It seems that if this final happens again in a few years, we won’t be able to play it again.”

River Plate won, 3-1, in extra time on Sunday in a match that was relocated to Madrid after the first leg was twice suspended because Boca players were injured when River fans attacked their bus with rocks, bottles and pieces of wood. The teams

Real Madrid women’s team not a priority at the moment

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ADRID—In a speech during Real Madrid’s most recent general assembly, club president Florentino Perez spoke proudly about how esports will be part of the club’s future.

Perez also talked about plans for a possible Real Madrid theme park to be built in the Spanish capital.

The president took his time to address most of the concerns brought up by club members, but when asked about when Real Madrid was going to create a women’s team, Perez didn’t answer.

The topic, the club later said, wasn’t a priority at that moment.

The question still hasn’t been fully answered by Perez or by anybody else. The club that calls itself the best in the world remains far behind other European teams when it comes to women’s soccer.

“It’s 2018, every modern institution should be thinking about its position on gender issues and gender equality,” former Fifa Council member Moya Dodd told The Associated Press. “When such a big team has no accommodation for women players, I think it leaves a big question mark. And in time, history will be the judge of whether maybe they should have acted sooner on this.”

Real Madrid is one of the few top clubs still without a women’s team in Europe.

In Spain, Atletico Madrid has been the team to beat in recent years, having won the last two women’s league titles. Barcelona made it to the quarterfinals of the women’s Champions League this season, along with clubs

such as Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich and Chelsea.

Manchester United recently became the latest English club to add a women’s squad, and Roma, AC Milan and Inter Milan did the same in Italy. In Germany, Borussia Dortmund remains without a women’s side.

The only team that wears the “all-whites” uniform in Spain’s women’s first division is the Madrid Club de Futbol Femenino, which has nothing to do with Real Madrid and was created by a businessman disappointed that his daughter couldn’t play for the powerful Spanish club.

“The top teams are starting to understand that women’s soccer can contribute immensely to the club,” said Pedro Malabia, women’s soccer director for the Spanish league. “Any modern club which has women’s soccer gains a lot in terms of brand, international development and connection with fans. What better way to show that you are a club concerned with women than having a women’s division and treating it with respect within a professional structure?”

Real Madrid denied repeated requests for interviews to talk about women’s soccer and did not reply to e-mails requesting comment. The club’s press office referred to Perez’s comments made in the 2017 general assembly, when he said the club planned to create a women’s division but wouldn’t do it by signing players and starting a professional team. The initial goal would be to establish a youth system and give opportunities to young players to develop.

Nothing has materialized a year later, with the club saying studies remain under way.

Real Madrid had an opportunity to create a women’s team in 2013, when a project was presented to the club

by Ana Rossell Granados, a former player who had hoped to play for Madrid.

The club rejected the offer, and Granados went on to create CD Tacon, a women’s team currently in Spain’s second division. The team’s vice president is Rene Ramos, brother of Real Madrid captain Sergio Ramos.

“Women’s soccer is where it is now without Real Madrid, so the club is not essential,” said Granados, who operates her team with an annual budget of about €150,000 ($170,000). “We shouldn’t obligate clubs to have a women’s team. Real Madrid will create one when it feels it’s the right moment and when it sees that women’s soccer is actually a business, not only a social matter. We have shown that women’s soccer can be profitable.”

There have been rumors that Real Madrid, which reported an operating revenue of €750.9 million ($855 million) for 2017-2018, could eventually take over a team like Tacon or Madrid Club, buying their licenses and using the structure already in place. AP

SOCCER WALK OF FAME Brazil’s Marta

flashes two thumbs up as she stands in cement to make a plaque of her footprints that will be placed on Brazil’s Soccer Walk of Fame at the Maracana Stadium, in Rio de Janeiro on Monday. Marta has been named, “The Best Fifa Women’s Player” six times. AP

drew 2-2 in the first leg at Boca’s La Bombonera Stadium nearly a month ago.

Nearly 70,000 River fans waited for hours inside the team’s stadium two weeks ago before South American soccer governing body Conmebol suspended the match and later decided to play it outside Argentina because of safety concerns.

“Everybody knows that a lot of people wanted to watch this final,” River captain Leonardo Ponzio said. “But we have to be realistic, our society is not prepared for this type of event. This final is over, but a lot of things still need to be solved. All we can do is make sure that all of this never happens again.”

While hundreds of River Plate fans celebrated in Madrid’s iconic Puerta del Sol plaza, riot police had to take action against rowdy fans back in

Buenos Aires. Argentine media said some fans were detained and a few police officers sustained minor injuries in the downtown confrontations.

It wasn’t even certain that the Madrid final was actually the end of it all, as Boca could still try to appeal Conmebol’s decision not to disqualify River for the problems outside its stadium ahead of the second leg.

“As far as the sports side is concerned, to me it’s all over. River won,” Schelotto said. “As far as all the legal issues, it would be good for Conmebol or South American soccer to take some action. Not about who won the Copa or about sanctions to River or Boca, but to make sure that what happened the other day doesn’t happen again.

It’s not normal to throw rocks at a bus of a rival team.

Hopefully these things will not happen again.”

This year’s Copa Libertadores, South America’s equivalent to the Champions League, had been tarnished even before the fan violence marred the first leg of the “final of all finals” in Buenos Aires.

River Plate Coach Marcelo Gallardo ignored a ban from carrying out his duties in the semifinals against Brazilian club Gremio, and both River and Boca played with suspended players without punishment. There were also controversial video review decisions, including a red card reversed following a game as officials later concluded it was incorrectly shown to a player despite video review being used.

Conmebol had already decided that beginning next year the Copa Libertadores final will be played in a neutral site with a single game, with Chile hosting it in 2019.

River Assistant Coach Matias Biscay, replacing the suspended Gallardo, said he hoped the team’s victory would help ease the disappointment of those who missed the opportunity to witness the historic final this time.

“Not everybody is violent in our society, it’s just a small group,” Biscay said. “I think the people who behaved well and were patient the other day can enjoy a little bit of happiness after what the players achieved for them on the field.”

Two Colombian players, meanwhile, made all the difference—one good, one bad—in the Copa Libertadores final on Sunday.

Boca Juniors’ Wilmar Barrios was sent off close to the start of extra time, and River Plate’s Juan Fernando Quintero scored his team’s second goal at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium.

River added a third to win 3-1 and lift its fourth South American crown, 5-3, on aggregate.

The 25-year-old Barrios was one of Boca’s best players in the first 90 minutes, blocking out River’s creative midfield. His first yellow card came near the end of the second half of regular time, and the second following a violent tackle on Exequiel Palacios only two minutes into extra time.

Barrios did not speak to journalists after the match.

River took advantage of the extra man and 25-yearold Quintero, who nearly missed the final due to injury, scored after 108 minutes. The Colombian received the ball on the edge of Boca’s box and guided in a well-struck shot to put River ahead.

In the dying seconds of the match, Quintero assisted Gonzalo “Pity” Martinez, who pushed the ball into an empty net after Boca’s goalkeeper Esteban Andrada tried to score from a corner.

Wrapped in a Colombian flag, Quintero told journalists he wanted to pay a little tribute to the impoverished Medellin area he grew, a place once ruled by drug dealers.

“Greetings to all my Colombia and my Comuna 13,” he said. “I scored one of the best goals of my career tonight, so I am very happy. I want to enjoy it with my teammates and tomorrow start thinking of the Fifa Club World Cup.”

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FRIENDSHIP PREVAILS L

SOUTH Africa’s Chad le Clos displays his medal after the men’s 100-m butterfly final at the Aquatic Centre during the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, Australia, in April. AP

Le Clos supports growing rebellion by top swimmers

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ENEVA—Four-time Olympic medalist Chad le Clos threw his support on Monday behind a planned new competition that is leading top swimmers to rebel against their own governing body.

The International Swimming League (ISL), which aims to launch next year, “will benefit swimming with a new dynamic approach,” le Clos said.

The ISL is privately owned and outside the control of Switzerland-based governing body Fina. It also aims to pay higher prize money and involve athletes more in making decisions.

“Why should athletes not shape their own series like so many other Olympic sports?” the 2012 Olympic champion in 200-meter butterfly wrote on Twitter.

In an escalating dispute, ISL organizers canceled a swim meet this month in Turin, Italy, after Fina threatened to ban those taking part.

In response on Friday, three swimmers— Hungarian great Katinka Hosszu, and American teammates Tom Shields and Michael Andrew—filed an antitrust suit against Fina in a California court.

Fina allegedly asked for $50 million over 10 years to let the ISL operate, before organizers called off talks.

Le Clos said he is “so disappointed that our sport is not open to change” and that it needs innovation.

“We need to create different media and commercial opportunities,” he said. “Everyone in swimming should consider the future.”

The South African star fueled the dispute ahead of competing in Fina’s short-course world championships in Hangzhou, China.

Fina said in a statement on Sunday it was focused on its 25-meter pool event rather than the legal challenge.

“As always, Fina remains open to proposals that would genuinely enhance— rather than conflict with—the current and planned competition calendars,” the governing body said.

An unrelated European ruling last year shows swimmers have a case to challenge possible anticompetitive behavior. Dutch speedskaters won a European Commission decision in Brussels against the Swiss-based International Skating Union. They had been threatened with bans for wanting to compete in a South Korean-organized “Icederby” event in Dubai. AP

VIDEO REVIEW LAUSANNE, Switzerland—Video review and goal-line technology are coming to water polo to help the oldest Olympic team sport keep pace.

Fina, the governing body of aquatics, says video monitoring can “identify and sanction incidents of brutality or extreme violence” that were missed by game officials or “not appropriately punished.”

The system can also be used to decide when the ball crosses the goal line.

In a statement, Fina President Julio Maglione says water polo—which debuted at the 1900 Paris Olympics—needed updating given “what is currently offered in a very competitive sport international environment.”

The modernizing changes were among wideranging rules changes approved by Fina member federations at a special meeting in China. AP

UNIVERSITY GAMES

Athletes gather during the opening ceremony of the 19th Asean University Games at the Wunnatheikdi Stadium in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, on Monday. Myanmar is hosting the multisports event for the first time. AP

OS ANGELES—LeBron James hit his first free throw to put the Lakers up by two. Dwyane Wade sidled up to him before the second shot.

“Bro, just miss it so I can shoot the game-winner,” Wade said in the waning seconds of their last game together. “Me and you. One on one. Just let me shoot it and go for it.”

LeBron didn’t miss. Dwyane didn’t really expect him to.

They still got that last showdown, one on one with the game on the line. Wade launched a 27-foot fadeaway jumper that didn’t go down, and the buzzer eventually sounded on the Lakers’ 108-105 victory over Miami on Monday night while they scrapped for one last rebound.

To the final moment in their 16 seasons of simultaneous stardom, these rivals and teammates competed with passion and love.

When it was over, they hugged and vowed to get together soon.

“That’s just us,” James said. “Some people say you shouldn’t be friends with your competitors. But even with our friendship, we competed against each other, and we pushed each other.”

James scored 28 points and Los Angeles survived Wade’s 15-point performance in the second half.

James and Wade savored what was likely the final joint chapter of two careers that have intersected repeatedly since they entered the National Basketball Association together in 2003. After seven seasons as Eastern Conference rivals, Wade and James teamed up with the Heat in 2010 to win two championships while reaching four consecutive NBA Finals, and they spent half of last season together in Cleveland.

Wade intends to retire after this season, and Staples Center sent him out of Los Angeles in style with multiple standing ovations and a tribute video in the first quarter. Wade’s wife, actor Gabrielle Union, was among the fans at courtside as the high-scoring guard played 32 minutes and got rolling with a second-half flurry that recalled his prime.

James and Wade both missed big shots down the stretch, but James hit those two free throws with 22.5 seconds left. They also got to guard each other down the stretch,

LEBRON JAMES and Dwyane Wade savor what is likely the final joint chapter of two careers that have intersected repeatedly since they entered the National Basketball Association together in 2003.

their teammates stepping back to allow the superstars to revel in the spotlight.

“This was the last time I was going to be able to guard him, so I waited to the end,” said Wade, who finished with 10 assists and five rebounds after a scoreless first half. “He knows my moves just like I know his moves.

I just wanted to enjoy the competition for the last time.”

They traded jerseys after their postgame chat, but they could be even closer in the future. Wade expects to spend more time in Los Angeles next year in retirement, and James has already invited him to work out together and to “help me out with the young guys” on the Lakers.

Kyle Kuzma scored 33 points for the Lakers, who have won 13 of 17 overall and five straight at home.

Justise Winslow scored a careerhigh 28 points for Miami, hitting six three-pointers in the third stop on the Heat’s six-game road trip.

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Indiana 109, Washington 101 Philadelphia 116, Detroit 102 Boston 113, New Orleans 100 Milwaukee 108, Cleveland 92 Oklahoma City 122, Utah 113 Sacramento 108, Chicago 89 Dallas 101, Orlando 76 Denver 105, Memphis 99 LA Clippers 123, Phoenix 119, OT Golden State 116, Minnesota 108 LA Lakers 108, Miami 105

BERSAMINA, PASCUA LIFT PHL CAMPAIGN

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NTERNATIONAL Masters (IM) Paulo Bersamina and Haridas Pascua saved the day for host Philippines as they pulled off shocking results at the start of the Seveth Asian Continental Chess Championships-Second Manny Pacquiao Cup at the Tiara Hotel in Makati City on Monday night.

Bersamina, 20, pulled off the biggest upset of the day after he brought down third-seeded Grandmaster (GM) Le Quang Liem of Vietnam in 36 moves of a Guioco Piano.

Pascua, 25, on the other hand, held fourth pick GM Santosh Gujrathi Vidit of India to a 36-move draw of a Gruenfeld Defense.

The victory sent Bersamina in a 28-player tie atop the leaderboard that included second-round opponent GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov of Uzbekistan, who downed veteran IM Chito Garma.

Pascua, meanwhile, faced Indonesian IM Novenfta Priasmoro late on Tuesday in the tournament sanctioned by the National Chess Federation of the Philippines and bankrolled by the Philippines Sports Commission and Sen. Manny Pacquiao.

Bersamina and Pascua also prevented a shutout for the host country that fielded 18 players in the men’s section.

GMs John Paul Gomez, Darwin Laylo and Joey Antonio lost to No. 2 GM Wei Yi of China, No. 5 B. Adhiban of India and No. 8 GM S. P. Sethuraman of India, respectively.

Woman GM Janelle Mae Frayna, Woman Fide Master Shania Mae Mendoza, Woman IM Marie Antoinette San Diego and WFM Cherry Ann Mejia drew their opening-round matches.

Frayna, the country’s best hope, halved the point with Sivanesan Nithyalakshmi of Malaysia, while Mendoza stunned No. 3 IM Guo Qi of China with a fighting draw.

San Diego drew with No. 7 WGM Vo Thi Kim of Vietnam and Mejia split the point with No. 13 WGM Nguyen Thi Thanh.

The top 5 in the men’s section will advance to the World Cup while the champion in the women’s contest will qualify for the Women’s World Championship.

CURRY, WARRIORS BEAT WOLVES

STEVE KERR long ago ran out of superlatives to describe Stephen Curry.

The Warriors coach isn’t even trying anymore, not with the way his All-Star point guard is playing since coming back from a groin injury.

Curry had 38 points, seven rebounds and six assists, and Golden State beat the Minnesota Timberwolves, 116-108, on Monday night in Draymond Green’s return to the Warriors’ lineup.

Klay Thompson scored 26 points, and Kevin Durant had 22 as Golden State prepared for Wednesday’s showdown with Toronto by earning its fourth straight win.

Curry went 7 for 14 from three-point range.

“He’s good at basketball,” Kerr deadpanned. “Nothing he does surprises me.

Even on a night he gets off to a slow start he finds a way.”

Curry, who recently returned after sitting out 11 games with an injured groin, got going after missing six of his first nine shots. He made a pair of threes and scored 14 points in the third quarter, including Golden State’s final nine of the period, and then made consecutive shots from deep after the Timberwolves closed to 101-93 in the fourth. AP

‘SI’ SPORTSPERSON OF THE YEAR HE three-time National Basketball Association (NBA) champion Golden State Warriors are the fourth team to be honored as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year.

The Warriors join the 1980 US hockey team, the 1999 US Women’s World Cup soccer squad and the 2004 Boston Red Sox as the other team honorees.

Sports Illustrated announced the winner on Monday, and editor-in-chief Chris Stone said they have been thinking of some way to honor the Warriors during their run of three titles in four years. He also acknowledged that there were a couple years where Steph Curry has been in the conversation.

“There is something transcendent about the team where the sum of their parts was apparent from the beginning,” Stone said. “What they have built into a dynasty is a function of empirical success.

They’re really a generational team. I don’t know if, in my lifetime, there has been a team where the pieces have blended so beautifully together.”

Stone also said that the Warriors’ honor is more about the celebration of the organization doing something unique over an extended period while the other teams were honored for

NBA RESULTS

what they did in a certain year.

Alexander Ovechkin, who led the Washington Capitals to their first Stanley Cup title, Tiger Woods and LeBron James also received consideration, but Stone said the Warriors felt like the favorite when they repeated as NBA champions.

“In the same way they play, they seem to speak in a single voice,” Stone said. “The unity of message with the Warriors is the same way we refer to LeBron and his answering some of the hard questions. They did it forcefully, but also civilly, in a way that helps advance conversations.”

The Warriors will receive the award during a ceremony in Los Angeles on Tuesday that will air on NBCSN on Thursday.

“This is an incredible honor and one that certainly signifies our Strength in Numbers philosophy as a team and organization,”Warriors President of Basketball Operations/General Manager Bob Myers said. “Our success is due to the contributions of every single player, coach and staff member in our organization; for Sports Illustrated to recognize this unique dynamic is truly special.” AP

WUSHU BETS PREVAIL IN NANJING, HOPEFUL ON 30TH SEA GAMES BID

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HE Philippine wushu team hopes to translate its recent success on the international stage to gold medals in next year’s 30th Southeast Asian Games.

Veterans Agatha Wong and Daniel Parantac won three of the seven gold medals staked in the recent First Asian Traditional Wushu Championships in Nanjing, China Both are looking to duplicate their acts when the country hosts the SEA Games from November 30 to December 11 next year despite the expected pressure weighing on the team to deliver.

“We are more focused on the SEA Games because they are a major event the country is hosting,” Parantac said.

“I’m going to compete as much as I can to give pride and honor to the country,” added the 20-year-old Wong, who continues to represent the Philippines in international meet despite tendonitis and a grade 2 slipped disc.

The two joined their teammates Johnzenth Gajo, Jones Llabre, Sandrex Gainzan and Dave Degala in the weekly Philippine Sportswriters Association Forum on Tuesday at the Tapa King Restaurant at the Farmers Plaza in Cubao, Quezon City.

Wong won golds in taijijian and taijiquan, while Parantac bagged one in taijijian along with Llabare and Thornton Quieney Lou Sayan. Gajo accounted for two more gold medals in changquan and daoshu.

Degala and Gainzan each bagged a bronze medal.

Wong and Parantac said their victories in Nanjing could also add pressure on the team’s bid to make up for the one gold medal the Filipinos won in the SEA Games last year in Kuala Lumpur.

“The factor of support system is good, but during competition, I try to set it aside and focus on my form,” Wong, who clinched a bronze medal in the Jakarta Asian Games, told the session presented by San Miguel Corp., Tapa King and the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.

orts

sMirror

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

SOUTHWOODS IN SCORCHING START

Tigresses beat U.E. belles, face Lady Maroons in final

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NIVERSITY of Santo Tomas (UST) overcame a rusty start to clobber University of the East (UE), 27-25, 19-25, 25-14, 25-20, to book a ticket to the finals of the Philippine Superliga Collegiate Grand Slam on Tuesday at the Muntinlupa City Sports Center.

The troika of Eya Laure, Milena Alessandrini and Tin Francisco were at its best, powering the Tigresses to an impressive win that sent them to the finals against University of the Philippines (UP).

The winner-take-all final is set on December 20 at the Mall of Asia Arena.

Rookie sensation Laure uncorked 15 points built on 13 kills, while skipper Francisco had 14 hits for the Tigresses, who inched closer to sweeping the elimination round.

Alessandrini chipped in 13 points on top of 13 digs, while Dimdim Pacres stepped up with seven hits, including the set-clinching kill in the third

and fourth sets.

Despite arranging a finals duel with collegiate rival UP, UST Coach Kungfu Reyes believes that a lot of work needs to be done.

For one, the Tigresses committed most of their 27 unforced errors in the first two sets for that sluggish start.

“Our offensive transition still needs to improve,” said Reyes following their crucial win that was completed in one hour and 54 minutes.

“We had a lot of errors that we could have converted. We still have to polish our game.”

Judith Abil shone with 15 points for the Lady Red Warriors, who dropped their second straight game sliding to a 1-3 wonlost record.

LUIGI PAOLO WONG submits 31 points for Royal Northwoods.

Stags remain in ‘NC’ magic four

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AN SEBASTIAN College leaned on a balanced attack in beating Letran, 25-22, 25-16, 25-22, on Tuesday to remain in the magic four of the women’s section of the 94th National Collegiate Athletic Association volleyball tournament at the Filoil Flying V Centre in San Juan City.

Iris Oliveros unloaded 10 points she laced with three blocks, while team captain Joyce Sta. Rita, Nikka Dalisay, Shannai Requierme and Maryrhose Dapol contributed eight points apiece to power the Lady Stags to their third win in four outings.

The win also kept San Sebastian at No. 3

Bulldogs pull off volleyball stunner

behind defending champion Arellano University and San Beda, last year’s losing finalist, both unbeaten in four matches.

The Lady Stags somehow soothed the pain of their stinging 15-25, 16-25, 12-25 loss to the Lady Chiefs last Thursday.

In men’s play, San Sebastian turned back Letran, 13-25, 25-14, 25-19, 25-19, to claim its second win against as many setbacks.

Timothy Eusebio unleashed 15 points, while Kince Sanchez, Julius James Lana and Robbie Pamittan added 12 points each.

Letran’s men’s and women’s squads sputtered to 1-3 cards.

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ANILA Southwoods started with a bang and posted a mammoth 22-point lead to kick off their title-retention bid for the Fil Championship crown on Tuesday in the 69th Fil-Am Invitational Golf Tournament.

Carl Corpus had three birdies and two bogeys for the first subpar round at the short and very tricky Baguio Country Club (BCC)—a one-under par 60 for 37 points for Southwoods.

Yuto Katsuragawa had a 35 points, while Aidric Chan and Aguri Iwasaki chipped in 34 and 32 points, respectively, for the reigning champions, whose “elder” member Junjun Plana did not count with a 30.

Cousins Corpuz and Chan are only 17, while the two Japanese are 20, giving Southwoods an average age of 18-and-halfyears. Plana? He debuted in the tournament in 1982 and played for Southwoods in 1997.

Luigi Paolo Wong and Nic Gatmaytan made 31 points and with Carlo Villaroman’s 28 and Richard Joson’s 26, Royal Northwoods ran second with 116—nine up on Forest Hill which drew 29 from Rupert Zaragosa, 28 from Dan Co and 26 and 24 from Jude Eustaquio and Inigo Raymundo, respectively.

Mizuno was a distant fourth with 99 points.

“We came here prepared and we only need to play good for us to win. I always tell the boys to be prepared for a tournament,” Southwoods captain Thirdy Escano said.

The team has been playing for a month in preparation for the Fil-Am and Escano said that although they do not frequent Baguio City to practice, they try to go to a course that

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ALASKA’S Mike Harris challenges his Magnolia counterpart Romeo Travis.

Grassroots football continues to grow

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KIDS show off their potentials on the pitch.

approximates the BCC and Camp John Hay layouts.

The two Japanese, Escano added, have trained for the tournament for the past month on local courses.

BCC, meanwhile, took advantage of an Ultraflight Golf Club I meltdown to take an 11-stroke lead in Fil B at their par-61 home course.

The cohosts almost matched their first day output with 101 for a 205 going into the longer CJH course in the third round.

Jef Razon had a team best 30 points to lead BCC, while Euls Austin, Goody Ignacio and Ely Lagman made 26, 24 and 21 points, respectively, to count for the team.

Day one leader Ultraflight collapsed with a 73 after an eye popping 121 on Day One, so far is the best score at the BCC. Butch Bakunawa led Ultraflight with 24 points, after a first round 14 which did not count. But his teammates fared miserably with Antonio Guttierez shooting 19 (from 30), Sonny Tiglao 16 (from 26) and Cocoy Sulaik falling to 14 from a threeover 33 the day before.

Baguio Summer Capital stayed at third spot after an 88 for 180 points to keep a onepoint lead over Cool Jocks (89

ACES SEEK EQUALIZER

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HE Philippines, represented by reigning University Athletic Association of the Philippines men’s champion National University (NU), stunned titleholders Thailand, 3028, 25-23, 25-19, in the curtain-raiser of the 19th Asean University Games volleyball tournament on Tuesday in Naypyitaw, Myanmar.

The shock Pool A win virtually sealed the Filipinos’ spot in the semifinals of the five-day event.

The Philippines will play Malaysia in the final day of pool action on Wednesday, with the Filipinos trying to clinch the No. 1 ranking in their group.

The Thais ended up with an even 1-1 won-lost record following a 25-14, 25-12, 25-21 conquest of the Malaysians also on Tuesday.

The six teams were divided into two pools in the round-robin preliminaries. Only the top two teams from each group in the preliminaries will advance to the crossover semifinals, with the Pool A winners taking on Pool B second placers and the No. 1 teams in Pool B facing the Pool A runners-ups.

Pool B is composed of Singapore, Indonesia and host Myanmar. The hosts swept the Indonesians, 25-18, 25-16, 25-19, in their opening match.

The semifinals are set on Thursday, while the medal matches will be played on Friday.

Volleyball is one of the 17 sports in the program of the Asean University Games that end on Friday.

Two years ago in Singapore, Ateneo’s women’s and men’s volleyball teams clinched bronze medals.

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LASKA Football Cup looks to go international soon.

Like a kid growing up, the Alaska Football Cup is creating more opportunities for improvement.

The Alaska Football Cup recently staged its 23rd edition at the Alabang Country Club anew, which drew some 4,000 players from 260 teams nationwide.

Thousands of children athletes aged three to 16 and accompanied by their parents pitted their skills and had fun in one of the biggest football tournaments in the country.

Tournament director Tomas Lozano, a former Real Madrid footballer, feels the Alaska Football Cup is ready to scale greater heights—by adding international color to it.

“Football will not be stopping anymore. It will grow and grow and grow. It is only we have to provide where are we going and the kids will follow,” Lozano said. “Now we are reaching the maximum 280 to 300 teams and improve the

quality of facilities. Invite the best team we can invite, invite maybe a few foreign teams.”

The program aims to inspire children to develop their winning habits by encouraging them to live healthy, have an active lifestyle and develop good values.

“Alaska’s role is to really encourage them to play an active lifestyle and we also give the proper nutrition by encouraging them to drink their milk and just eat healthy,” Diane Guarte, Alaska associate brand manager, said.

Cheering on at the sidelines but upfront with their encouragement are the ever-supportive parents, especially mothers like Jen Lozano.

“I watch them every time they have games. I’m there to support the team, not just my kid. It is also important that you feed them well, give them milk and give them nutritious food, and it helps. That’s how I show my support for my kid, also for the team,” Lozano said.

LASKA tries to capitalize on the shift of momentum as the Aces go for the series equalizer against the Magnolia Hotshots in Game Four of the Philippine Basketball Association Governors’ Cup best-of-seven titular showdown on Wednesday at the Smart Araneta Coliseum.

The Aces got their winning ways back after successvive losses with a 100-71 victory on Sunday.

Eager to put the duel in equal footing, Alaska tries to replicate the huge win in the match set at 7 p.m.

But Head Coach Alex Compton said their Game Three victory meant little as they still trail in the Finals.

“If you ask me, would I rather won this game by that score or be up 2-1? I’d gladly be up, 2-1,” Compton said. “We’re still down. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad we won. It’s better to win, but we’re still down 2-1.”

The Aces dealt the Hotshots their worst loss in the Finals with the 29-point setback.

The franchise’s previous worst record was in Game Five of the 1997 Governors’ Cup, 66-94, which, coincidentally, was against Alaska, too.

With the humiliation that Magnolia got, Compton braced for an uprising by their opponents.

“I can almost guarantee you that there won’t be another game like this in the Finals.

That’s what I think,” Compton said. “I don’t think Game Four will be anything like this [Game Three]. While it would be great to hope that this would happen every game, that’s like a fairy tale. That’s not going to happen.”

Import Mike Harris powered the Aces with 36 points, Vic Manuel added 14, while Simon Enciso and Carl Bryan Cruz chipped in 12 and 10, respectively.

Alaska trailed in the first quarter, until Cruz initiated his team’s 34-point production in the second quarter.

From there, the lead ballooned to 36 in the final quarter behind Manuel’s basket with under eight minutes left.

Compton is hoping that they would flash the same performance in Game Four.

“We’re going to try and come back and bring the same level of intensity,” he said.

The league will award the best local player and best import of the conference before the game.

Paul Lee of Magnolia, Chris Banchero of Alaska and Christian Standhardinger are the top picks for the Best Player of the Conference award, while Harris, Magnolia’s Romeo Travis, Ginebra’s Justin Brownlee, Meralco’s Allen Durham, Phoenix’s Eugune Phelps and Blackwater’s Heny Walker are the bets for the Best Import race. Ramon Rafael Bonilla

points). Four other teams were within striking distance— Rural Bankers II and TGIS Davao with 177s after rounds of 88 and 85, respectively, and CJH tied Ventureslink-RobrosJayworks with 175 after rounds of 88 and 85.

AL MENDOZA alsol47@yahoo.com

THAT’S ALL

A shot at PBA Finals and Fil-Am golf

IT is weird but it keeps happening.

A team defeats a team two-in-a-row—one win by a ghastly rout—only to bow to the same squad in the third game. Not only lose but to end up beaten black and blue.

That’s what’s happening in the ongoing title showdown for the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) Governors’ Cup between Magnolia and Alaska.

Magnolia won the first two games, 100-84 and 77-71, respectively.

With those results, you would, of course, put your money on Magnolia in Game Three.

Piece of cake.

But then, what do you know?

Alaska came roaring back and proceeded to massacre Magnolia, 100-71, to inch to within 1-2 in the best-of-seven Finals.

“I think we had a great defensive effort and amazing shots,” said Alaska Coach Alex Compton.

“But the overall story of the game was we made a bunch of shots in the first three quarters. We didn’t commit many turnovers and we played defense with great intensity.”

But Magnolia Coach Chito Victolero saw the game differently, was short of accusing Compton of baiting the referees to side with Alaska in Game Three.

“Compton drew the attention of the referees after Game Two and he got it,” said Victolero in Tagalog. “I’m now also attracting the attention of the refs...and what I’m just asking is consistency on calls. What they’d call on the other side, they should also call the same on us.”

Well, it is a given that referees are key cogs in every championship showdown. One bad call by a ref could swing the outcome of a game.

But then, let’s be fair.

Referees may not be perfect, but they shouldn’t be blamed for defeats we suffer.

What’s happening at times, if not most of the time, is seeing coaches point an accusing finger at the refs when setbacks hit them.

Will it happen again in tonight’s Game Four between Magnolia and Alaska?

But really, this ref-bashing habit has got to end if we are to continue believing in PBA’s reason for existence.

The league has been there 43 years and it would not have survived this long if it did not have the resilience and staying power to weather every storm that came its way, lapses in officiating included.

Let’s just then play ball, please?

THAT’S IT For the record, the 69th Fil-Am Golf Invitational now ongoing in Baguio City’s Camp John Hay and Baguio Country Club has drawn a total of 251 teams from more than 10 countries—127 in Seniors play and 124 in Men’s Regular. At an average of five players per team, the City of Pines is hosting at least 1,255 golfers, not counting two alternates allowed per team.

The world’s longest-running amateur golf tilt played in two weeks is presented mainly by San Miguel Corp. and Toyota. Toyota’s best-selling Rush is a hole-in-one prize at No. 10 of Baguio CC and at No. 18 of Camp John Hay. The biggest amateur golf tournament in the world is being co-chaired again by CJH’s GM Tim Allen and BCC’s GM Anthony de Leon. The best four scores from the five-man teams will count for the day, with a birdie given three points, par 2 points and bogey 1 point. A player holing out for double bogey will incur a two-point penalty for his team—a rule adopted to speed up play in the series ending December 15. Without this rule, every round could end up uncompleted on account of darkness—due to the sheer volume of players.

U.S.O.C. BUREAUCRACY

Sports BusinessMirror

C4

| Wednesday, December 12, 2018

mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph Editor: Jun Lomibao

MY BALL!

India’s Ravi Ashwin takes a catch to dismiss Australia’s Usman Khawaja during the first cricket test between Australia and India in Adelaide, Australia, over the weekend. AP

SAILING IN ROUGH WATERS T

HE former head of sailing’s governing body has joined other sailing officials in questioning the results of a vote to add a mixed-gender offshore class to the 2024 Olympics.

Paul Henderson of Toronto, who also is a former member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said in a letter to World Sailing President Kim Andersen of Denmark that some votes were recorded incorrectly during the recent annual conference in Sarasota, Florida, and the governing body must reopen the issue.

“Your prompt attention to this rather unfortunate situation is in order,” Henderson wrote to Andersen on Saturday.

Henderson was president of what was then called the International Sailing Federation from 1994 to 2004 and was on the IOC from 2000 to 2004.

At least four members of World Sailing’s Council have said their votes were improperly recorded, which should have been enough to defeat the offshore proposal. In the process of approving the offshore class, the Finn class, which has been in the Olympics since 1952, would be eliminated after the 2020 Tokyo Games.

Andersen said that once World Sailing has completed the overview of the voting processes, “we need to decide what appropriate action to take next.”

A British woman sailing solo in a round-the-world race is being rescued after losing her mast and being knocked unconscious in a vicious storm in the Southern Ocean.

Golden Globe Race officials said Thursday on the race web site that they have been in regular radio contact with Susie Goodall since she regained consciousness.

Goodall is said to be “safe and secure” after losing her mast in the Southern Ocean, 3,200 kilometers west of Cape Horn near the southern tip of South America.

Chilean authorities have directed the MV Tian Fu to rescue her. The carrier is expected to reach Goodall on Friday.

The 29-year-old Goodall was the youngest entrant and the sole female in the demanding race.

Her entry on the race web site says she started sailing at the age of three and has crossed the Atlantic Ocean while sailing alone.

Her text messages to race officials chronicled the disaster that disabled her boat.

On Wednesday at 0829 GMT, she texted: “Taking a hammering! Wondering what on earth I’m doing out here” and sent her position.

Four hours later, she said: “Dismasted. Hull OK. No form of jury rig. Total loss” and updated her position.

Next came this: “Interior total wreck. Liferaft OK.” Then came word of her injury: “Nasty head bang as boat pitchpoled. Unbelievably roly now.”

And a minute later: “Totally & utterly gutted!”

The competition began on July 1 in Les Sables-d’Olonne, France, with 18 skippers each planning to sail roughly 38,280 kilometers alone, nonstop and without outside assistance before returning to the same French port.

Some modern technology, including the use of satellite navigation aids, were banned as race officials tried to recreate conditions used in the first Golden Globe Race in 1968. AP

INQUIRY POSTPONED

Khabib Nurmagomedov (right) takes down Conor McGregor during their lightweight title mixed martial arts bout at UFC 229 in Las Vegas, Nevada, early last month. Regulators postponed until next month hearings on suspensions against McGregor and Nurmagomedov for a brawl after their match. AP

BRITISH yachtswoman Susie Goodall is being rescued in the Southern Ocean. AP

Malta becomes smallest nation to challenge for America’s Cup S AN DIEGO—The Mediterranean archipelago of Malta has become the smallest country to challenge for the America’s Cup, adding an intriguing element to the competition for sailing’s biggest prize even if it faces extremely long odds to win the oldest trophy in international sports.

The Royal Malta Yacht Club’s challenge has been accepted by the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, making it the fourth challenger for the 36th America’s Cup in 2021 in Auckland.

Malta Altus Challenge’s team principal is Pasquale

Cataldi, an Italian businessman based in Malta and the founder and CEO of Altus, a multinational real estate and development company. The sailing team, which will include Malta nationals and international sailors as allowed under the cup’s protocol, will be announced in early 2019.

As a late entry and with a restricted budget compared to the other challengers, Malta Altus Challenge is planning on a one-boat campaign and will look to Emirates Team New Zealand for inspiration, Cataldi said in a statement.

“We don’t need to be the biggest team. We want to stay focused on what we have to do to succeed and be smart with

how we use our resources,” Cataldi said. “We have already seen in the past how a similar approach by New Zealand allowed a smaller team to defeat bigger rivals.”

Malta has a population of approximately 460,000 and a land mass of just 316 square kilometers.

The previous smallest challenger was New Zealand.

The Kiwis failed in their first three attempts to win the America’s Cup before stunning Dennis Conner in a fiverace sweep off San Diego in 1995.

“After New Zealand, they are now the smallest country to challenge for the America’s Cup. We know

what it is like to be a small team facing long odds in taking on one of the biggest challenges in sport, and we wish them the best,” Emirates Team New Zealand CEO Grant Dalton said in a statement.

New Zealand defended the America’s Cup in 2000 before losing it in 2003 to Alinghi of Switzerland. The Kiwis were on the cusp of winning it back in 2013 but blew an 8-1 lead against Oracle Team USA in one of the biggest collapses in sports. The underfunded and underdog Kiwis bounced back in 2017 in Bermuda, stunning Oracle Team USA to take the silver trophy back Down Under. AP

D

By Eddie Pells The Associated Press

ENVER—An independent report details a toxic pattern of bureaucratic paralysis among Olympic leaders who reacted slowly, if at all, after they knew Larry Nassar was suspected of molesting young gymnasts.

From the top office at the US Olympic Committee (USOC) to FBI bureaus in three cities to what was essentially an unchecked, rogue operation at the Karolyi Ranch in Texas, nobody stepped in quickly enough to stifle Nassar’s crimes, the report concludes.

That delay ultimately gave Nassar more than a full year to abuse athletes after the first allegations surfaced.

The USOC swiftly fired sports performance chief Alan Ashley in the wake of Monday’s release of the 233-page report from the law firm Ropes & Gray.

One of its conclusions was that neither Ashley nor Scott Blackmun, who resigned in February as CEO of the USOC, elevated concerns about alleged abuse when they first learned of them from USA Gymnastics (USAG) President Steve Penny in July 2015.

And an e-mail from Penny notifying Blackmun and Ashley of Nassar’s decision to step down from his volunteer position at USAG in September 2015—after allegations had surfaced but before they’d become widely known—was deleted from both executives’ accounts. The report suggests Blackmun was fearful his e-mail system may have been vulnerable to Russian hacking.

“One thing we’ve learned from this experience is that these types of situations should be escalated,” said Susanne Lyons, a board member who served as acting CEO earlier this year. “Transparency is important.”

The report says the USOC, USAG, Michigan State and the FBI all failed to protect athletes. The failures led to a 14-month period—July 2015 to September 2016— during which Nassar, while still employed at Michigan State, continued to molest young women.

“While Nassar bears ultimate responsibility for his decades-long abuse of girls and young women, he did not operate in a vacuum,” the report says. “Instead, he acted within an ecosystem that facilitated his criminal acts.”

Nassar is serving decades in prison on charges of child pornography and for molesting young women and girls under the guise of medical treatment; many of his accusers testified in heart-wrenching detail at his sentencing hearing in January.

The USOC commissioned the report shortly after the testimony. More than 100 people were interviewed, including some survivors of sexual abuse. But a sizable number of Nassar victims—including 180 being represented by attorney John Manly—refused to participate because Manly didn’t believe the report was completely independent of the USOC. “That being said, it is a stinging indictment of the highest levels of the leadership of the United States Olympic Committee for their role in the cover-up [of] the largest sex-abuse scandal in the history of sports,” Manly said.

Among the conclusions: n Blackmun didn’t report the allegations to either the USOC board or anyone on his staff. When asked about the Nassar case by chief security officer Larry Buendorf, who had received word separately from Penny, Blackmun told Buendorf he was aware of the issue but did not seek further guidance. Blackmun, who voluntarily answered questions for the report, explained he understood the seriousness of the Nassar allegations, but because they involved an “insider”—Nassar was well-respected and had worked with USAG for nearly 30 years—the case was “especially sensitive.”

n While Penny repeatedly tried to get the FBI to investigate, one of his key objectives was to keep the allegations from spilling into the public, to avoid “sending shockwaves through the community,” as he said in a conversation with an FBI agent. Because of that, very few inside USAG knew the extent of Nassar’s crimes—a factor that curtailed efforts to control him. n Despite Penny’s contacts with law enforcement, the report concludes “the investigation appears to have languished... for over seven months” in the FBI’s Detroit office. USAG later took the allegations to the FBI’s Los Angeles office, but not until the Indianapolis Star report detailing Nassar’s abuse came out in September 2016 did that office take action. Meanwhile, the report includes details of Penny meeting with an FBI agent, offering him help in getting a security job at the USOC. The backdrop of it all was a USOC bureaucracy that had grown reluctant to police the sports organizations it oversaw. When Blackmun took over the USOC, its relationships with the national governing bodies were at a low point. He spent years trying to repair the relationships, and the USOC “chose to adopt a deferential, service-oriented approach” to NGBs, according to the report.

“In this governance model, the USOC exerted its broad statutory authority and monetary influence over individual sports primarily for the purpose of encouraging success at the Olympic Games, effectively outsourcing any decisions regarding on-the-ground child-protective practices to the NGBs,” the report states.

That, in the minds of many of the survivors, was the most critical shortcoming: In short, the USOC valued medals over the athletes who won them.

L

Liberating God

iberating God, in You, all find justice. Awaken our hearts to Your living Word as we pray: Teach us Your ways, O God. You delight in Your people; help us to show love and appreciation to our elders especially to our grandparents. You adorn the poor with salvation; inspire us to greater love and action for those without adequate shelter, heat or food. You shepherd Your flock; strengthen parents, guardians, and teachers in love, tenderness, and wisdom.

May the God of all grace bless us and lead us along paths of truth and peace through Christ our Shepherd. Amen! give us this day SHARED BY LUISA LACSON, HFL Word&Life Publications • teacherlouie1965@yahoo.com

Editor: Gerard S. Ramos • lifestylebusinessmirror@gmail.com

Life

box office: ‘Ralph’ tops box office again, ‘Aquaman’ is a hit in China D3

BusinessMirror

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

D1

The Web really isn’t worldwide– each country has a different access

By Allison McDonald

W

University of Michigan

hat the Internet looks like to users in the United States can be quite different from the online experience of people in other countries. Some of those variations are due to government censorship of online services, which is a significant threat to Internet freedom worldwide. But private companies— many based in the US—are also building obstacles to users from around the world who want to freely explore the Internet.

Web site operators and Internet traffic managers often choose to deny access to users based on their location. Users from certain countries can’t visit certain web sites—not because their governments say so, or because their employers want them to focus on work, but because a corporation halfway around the world has made a decision to deny them access.

This geoblocking, as it’s called, is not always nefarious. US companies may block traffic from certain countries to comply with federal economic sanctions. Shopping web sites might choose not to have visitors from countries they don’t ship goods to. Media sites might not be able to comply with other nations’ privacy laws. But other times it’s out of convenience, or laziness: It may be easier to stop hacking attempts from a country by blocking every user from that country, rather than increasing security of vulnerable systems.

Whatever its justifications, this blocking is increasing on all kinds of web sites and is affecting users from almost every country in the world. Geoblocking cuts people off from global markets and international communications just as effectively as government censorship. And it creates a more splintered Internet, where each country has its own bubble of content and services, rather than sharing a global commons of information and interconnection.

Measuring geoblocking globally

As a team of Internet freedom researchers, my colleagues and I investigated the mechanics of geoblocking, including where geoblocking is happening, what content was being blocked and how web sites were practicing geoblocking.

We used a service called Luminati, which provides researchers remote, automated access to residential Internet connections around the world. Our automated system used those connections to see what more than 14,000 sites look like from 177 countries, and compared the results in each country.

Web sites that didn’t block traffic typically served us a large file providing rich Internet content, including text, images and video.

Web sites that were blocked usually delivered just a short notice saying that access was denied because of the visitor’s location. When the same web site delivered a large file to an address in one country and a very short one to another, we knew we had a good chance of finding that the site was conducted geoblocking.

We found that the Internet does indeed look very different depending on where you’re connecting from. Users in countries under US sanctions—Iran, Syria, Sudan and Cuba—had access to significantly fewer web sites than in other countries. People in China and Russia faced similar restrictions, though not as many. Some countries are less affected, but of the 177 countries we studied, every one—except the Seychelles—was subjected to at least some

geoblocking, including the US. Shopping web sites were the most likely to geoblock, perhaps because of economic sanctions or more straightforward business reasons. But some web sites hosting news and educational resources chose to block users from specific countries, limiting those people’s access to outside information and perspectives.

The role of Internet middlemen

We also found that many web sites are taking advantage of geoblocking services provided by their hosting companies and online middleman firms called content delivery networks. These companies operate systems that preload Web content at key locations around the world to speed service to nearby Internet users, so an Australian looking for an article in The Washington Post doesn’t have to wait for the request to travel halfway around the world and back. With a content delivery network, there’s already an up-todate electronic copy of The Washington Post stored in, say, Sydney.

Many content delivery network services include a dashboard where a site administrator can easily select which countries to deliver the web site’s information to—and which ones to block.

Content delivery networks in general are a lot cheaper than they used to be, which means more and more web site operators are getting their hands on simple geoblocking tools. In fact, based on data that were provided to us by Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest content delivery networks, this trend is only increasing. As of August 2018 more than 37 percent of Cloudflare’s large-business customers block their web site in at least one country.

Sometimes an unavailable web site is merely an inconvenience—I can’t order my Irish friends a pizza from the US, for example. Other times geoblocking can really cause problems. We encountered an Iranian student who couldn’t apply to graduate school abroad because the admissions web site wouldn’t accept payment of the application fee from Iran.

Another person may be unable to read the news from a major international city, or plan a trip abroad because travel web sites are all unavailable from their home.

Geoblocking is ineffective

Restricting access based on geography is unlikely to affect all Internet users equally. As when evading censorship, getting around

a geoblock isn’t necessarily difficult. But it might be expensive, expose users to additional tracking of their online activity, or require a level of technical literacy that not everyone has. Even if a user can ultimately access the content they were originally denied, they may bear a significant burden to gain access to the wider Internet.

It’s also not easy—or necessarily accurate—to identify an Internet user’s physical location. Using a computer’s numeric IP address to estimate where in the world it’s being used is notoriously unreliable. At least some users are likely being unfairly denied access to online services because their network address is determined to be somewhere they are not. However, rather than expanding the accessibility and accuracy of geoblocking, our group is encouraging researchers to address the needs of web sites while maintaining as open an access policy as possible.

The Internet has indelibly changed the world and the way people connect and do business. Researchers are working hard to keep this valuable resource available to everyone. Companies shouldn’t thwart those efforts by discriminating against users only because of where they are when they connect. AP

Globe Postpaid subscribers to enjoy six months of Amazon Prime Video Globe customers can get six months of Amazon Prime Video access compliments of Globe, with a postpaid plan. With this offer, Globe customers can watch movies and TV shows on Prime Video, including critically acclaimed and awardwinning Prime Original series like Homecoming, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, The Grand Tour, Emmy nominee and Golden Globe winner The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, an all-new season of The Man in the High Castle, and more.

All new and existing Globe Postpaid customers will be eligible for a six-month subscription (up to P150/monthly value) to Amazon Prime Video, which comes with Twitch Prime. After six months of Prime Video on us, you will be charged P150/

month for the next six months, and subscription renews at P300/month on the seventh month and thereafter.

Stream all of these shows and more legally with Globe as it strengthens its commitment to the #PlayItRight advocacy against piracy. This allows Globe customers to enjoy some of the best TV shows and movies from legitimate sources and recognized platforms only.

Subscribe to Amazon Prime Video and activate your six-month access today. The process is simple enough, starting by just texting “APV” minus the quotes to 8080. From there, subscribers can follow the easy instructions to enjoy a whole new world of entertainment on the go.

Globe Telecom Ernest Cu (right) with other Globe officials and Amazon Director for Mobile Business Development-Apac Krishan Patel (left).

Sun gives extra 12% discount at Lazada’s massive 12.12 Grand Year-End Sale It’s the most wonderful time of the year for consumers to shop their hearts out at Lazada’s 12.12 Grand YearEnd Sale (www.lazada.com.ph/1212)—and if you’re with Sun, you can enjoy an extra 12-percent off on top of exciting deals and deep discounts.

The telecommunications company is treating subscribers with the exclusive discount from December 12 to 15 via the Lazada app.

There is no minimum purchase required—simply add all the items you want to purchase in your cart, enter the promo code before the checkout and enjoy up to P300 off on your purchase.

Promo codes will be sent via SMS to qualified existing Sun postpaid subscribers, as well as new subscribers who have signed up for a new Sun Postpaid Plan at any Sun Shop or Sun Satellite Branch nationwide.

The promo is Sun’s special holiday treat for customers and coincides with Lazada’s epic sale featuring 1 million deals on electronics, gadgets, fashion items, beauty and hygiene products, household essentials, and a whole lot more from thousands of brands.

This online shopping event is the perfect opportunity to complete your Christmas gift list or save on last-minute stocking stuffers using the Lazada app on your phone.

Enjoying the best online shopping deals and connecting with your loved ones is a whole lot easier and more convenient with Sun Non-Stop LTE Plans.

Packed with great value, Sun Non-Stop LTE Plans come with nonstop access to Facebook, Messenger and Google Search to connect you to family and friends.

The plans also feature data for surfing, apps and Facebook; nonstop calls and texts to Sun numbers; and an LTE-ready smartphone—for as low as P599 per month.

EKG, other heart health features come to Apple Watch NEW YORK—Apple Watch is now fulfilling its promise to let people take EKGs of their heart and notify them of any irregular heartbeat.

Apple announced the heart features in September, but didn’t make them available until on Thursday. The new features have been given clearance by the US Food and Drug Administration and are for US customers only.

The watch can intermittently check the

wearer’s heart rhythm in the background and send a notification if it detects irregular heart rhythm. That can point to atrial fibrillation, a condition that can increase the risk of stroke and other complications.

Apple says the watch will notify users if it detects an irregular rhythm on five checks over at least 65 minutes.

When symptoms appear, users can also take an

EKG, or electrocardiogram, and share that with doctors.

This feature is available for the latest, Series 4 version of the watch. The app, called ECG, comes as part of a free software update for the watch.

The irregular heart notification is available for older models, too, starting with the “Series 1” model in 2016. It doesn’t work with the original, 2015 model.

Apple is adding medical features to make the

watch feel more useful to people. A fall detection feature launched in September. It claims to be able to tell the difference between a trip and a fall—and when the latter occurs, it will suggest calling 911 (or the equivalent outside the US). If it receives no response within a minute, the watch will automatically place an emergency call and message friends and family designated as emergency contacts. AP

D2

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Pet Corner BusinessMirror

Sully the service dog visits Bush’s casket

By Laurie Kellman The Associated Press

W

ASHINGTON—It’s often said that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

For the last six months, Sully the service dog was President George H.W. Bush’s. The yellow Labrador Retriever visited the president’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday alongside people in wheelchairs who benefited from the Americans With Disabilities Act that Bush signed in 1990.

John Miller, the president and CEO of America’s VetDogs, said the Bush family contacted Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after the late president’s wife of 73 years, Barbara, died in April.

America’s VetDogs chose Sully in part for his calm temperament.

“After Mrs. Bush’s death, general companionship was a big part of Sully’s job,” Miller said in a phone interview. “One of the things that I think was important to the president was the rest command, where Sully would rest his head on the president’s lap.”

Sully is 2 years old. He was named for retired airline pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III, who became famous for landing a damaged passenger jet on the Hudson River in 2009, saving everyone aboard.

Sully the dog achieved worldwide fame after a Bush family spokesman tweeted a photo of Sully laying by Bush’s flag-draped casket with the caption: “Mission completed.”

The pup traveled to Washington with the funeral retinue. And on Tuesday morning officials issued a two-minute warning for Sully’s arrival in the Rotunda.

Sully padded in, his leash held by Valerie Cramer, America’s VetDogs service dog

NEW YORK—Elm Pet Foods is the latest maker of dog food to issue a recall over elevated levels of vitamin D, which can cause kidney failure at high enough levels.

Similar recalls have been issued by ANF Inc., Sunshine Mills Inc., Natural Life Pet Products and Nutrisca over the last month.

Elm and others urge consumers to either dispose of or return several types of chicken and chickpea recipe dog food. They also urge dog owners to contact their veterinarian if the food was eaten.

Symptoms of vitamin D toxicity include vomiting, weight loss, increased urination and excessive thirst. AP

z

Today’s Horoscope

By Eugenia Last

CELEBRITIES BORN ON THIS DAY: Mayim Bialik, 43; Madchen Amick, 48; Regina Hall, 48; Jennifer Connelly, 48.

Happy Birthday: Memories will surface urging you to reconnect with your past and those you haven’t seen for some time. Going back in time will give way to closure and the ability to use the experiences you have had to help you engage in new beginnings. Use your charm to encourage those you love to share your journey and to grow with you. Your lucky numbers are 6, 10, 17, 24, 32, 38, 47.

a

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Do your best to help. Pitching in will ward off criticism and complaints. Learn from those with more experience; they will open up a passageway to the success you crave. Personal change should be looked at carefully before you begin. HHHH

b

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Put some thought into the relationships you share with others. Consider what you can do to make life better for those going through a tough time. What you share will bring you more joy than what you give.

Live, love, laugh. HH

c d e f

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Tidy up loose ends and you’ll enjoy the remainder of the month.

Don’t trust anyone else to take care of your responsibilities for you. Be open about what you want, how you feel and what you are willing to do. HHHHH

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Let’s get creative and end the year on a high note. Step up and offer solutions. You’ll be able to transform some of the difficulties you face into accomplishments you can be proud of. Romance is on the rise. HHH

Sully, former President George H.W. Bush’s service dog, pays his respects to President Bush as he lies in state at the US Capitol in Washington on December 4. AP the procession headed out.

Sully is headed back to America’s VetDogs in Smithtown, New York, where he was born and trained, Miller said.

Then he’ll go for training at Walter Reed to help brace, retrieve and otherwise help the veterans there get care. Sully will be

program manager.

At her command, he lay down—and threw a glance over his shoulder at the photographers scrambling to get his photo. He didn’t seem fazed. Cramer then led him around the casket to sit among the others. After a few minutes,

working with two dogs already in service at the veterans’ hospital, Sgt. Dillon and Sgt. Truman.

The dogs provided by America’s VetDogs are provided free of charge for a service that can cost upward of $50,000 to breed, train and place them, Miller said.

Iditarod clears four-time champion in dog-doping scandal

Elm Pet Foods, others recall dog food over vitamin D

www.businessmirror.com.ph

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Iditarod officials have cleared a four-time champion of any wrongdoing in a dog-doping scandal that followed the sled dog race last year.

Officials for the 1,000-mile (1,610 kilometer) Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race issued a statement this week absolving musher Dallas Seavey of any involvement in the drugging of his dogs, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Four of Seavey’s dogs tested positive for tramadol, an opioid painkiller and banned substance, following his secondplace finish in March 2017. Some Alaska veterinarians have questioned why anyone would administer the drug during the race because it may cause drowsiness.

Jeanne Olson, an Alaska veterinarian who treats sled dogs, sees no benefit in administering tramadol during a race because it causes drowsiness. Olson, who was the head veterinarian in the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race in the 1990s, prescribes it mostly for profound pain relief.

“But I also caution that the dogs are going to become sedated from it,” she said. “So when I first heard... that it was tramadol as the drug, I thought, ‘Well, that’s surprising. Why would anybody use that?’”

“We met with him multiple times and there was [sufficient] evidence to conclude he didn’t have anything to do with it,” said Mike Mills, president of Iditarod’s board of directors.

Mills declined to say what that evidence was.

“It’s a hard situation to untangle, but we’re comfortable that we made the right decision,” Mills said.

Seavey said he presented a “very compelling case” to the race board. After the test results were made public last year, he had suggested that someone sabotaged his team.

“I can’t prove what did happen, but we can strongly prove what didn’t happen,” Seavey said.

Seavey said he can’t share of all the information about the case, but he noted that one of his arguments dealt with the timing of the drug tests. The dogs had high levels of the drug immediately before test, which he knew was coming.

“It does not look like something someone was trying to get away with. It’s very blatant,” Seavey said.

While Mills said Seavey did not have knowledge of the doping, officials have not determined who was responsible for it.

“We’re convinced we’re never going to figure that out,” Mills said.

Seavey raced in Norway instead of running the Iditarod this year. He hasn’t decided where he will race next year.

“I’m not entirely sure which way we’re going, but I’m training dogs,” Seavey said. “This whole situation over a whole year-and-a-half has been tiresome, to say the least.

I’m focused on having fun with the dog team. The simple side of it.” AP

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Speed things up a bit and you will accomplish all you set out to do. Spend time with your lover, plan activities with youngsters or shop for little treasures you want to share or give to others. HHH

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): A good plan and a steady pace will help you keep the peace.

If someone overreacts, keep moving forward.

What you accomplish and the changes you make will have a positive impact on your life when you finish what you start. HHH

g

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Participate and explore new possibilities. You may not please everyone, but it’s time to enjoy life with people who share your interests and your opinions. Don’t miss out to avoid a dispute with someone who doesn’t know how to have fun. HHHHH

h

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Communicate to avoid a misunderstanding.

Don’t let an emotional incident at home ruin your day. Get out and pick up something special for someone you love. You don’t have to spend a lot; it’s the thought that counts. HH

i j

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Take a deep breath and follow your heart. It’s OK to walk away and say no. Take the high road and refuse to let anyone lead you down a path that does not feel right or doesn’t sit well with you. HHHH

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Personal gains look promising. Don’t let someone interfere with your plans by taking over. A physical change you make will draw attention and compliments. Romance will improve your personal life and make you feel good regarding prospects. HHH

k

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Make a point of taking care of your chores and responsibilities yourself. A change of pace or environment will do you good. Recognizing what you have will get you in the spirit of giving to those who are without. HHH

l

Dallas Seavey poses with his lead dogs Reef (left) and Tide after finishing the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Nome, Alaska. Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race issued a statement this week absolving Seavey of any involvement in the drugging of his dogs. AP

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Sign up to help out in your community. What you learn about those who have fallen on hard times will help you appreciate people from all walks of life.

An unusual relationship will develop with someone you least expect. HHH Birthday Baby: You are charming, sincere and creative. You are unique and adaptable.

‘on track’ by timothy e. parker The Universal Crossword/Edited by Timothy E. Parker

ACROSS 1 Distressful cry 5 Handy tools for cobblers 9 Iraqi port 14 Cornell founder’s first 15 “Silent Night,” for one 16 Wrinkly tangelos 17 Inspected the rails?

20 Time between events 21 Titles for Japanese emperors 22 Dealers in futures 23 Classify, as blood 24 Move crabbily 27 Stonefaced 32 Cul-de-___ 35 Strapped for money 37 Invisible emanation 38 Vehicle that makes huge splashes?

42 Soon, way old 43 Seed spreader 44 Olympics chant 45 Given a new role 48 Unwarranted, as pressure

50 Chart-topping songs 52 Enclose in a hollow 56 Bond’s order 60 Witness 62 Bad place to lean?

64 Instruction book 65 Fashionable borders?

66 Pesky insect 67 Feast celebrating the Exodus 68 Pointed direction?

69 Erupter in Sicily DOWN 1 Himalayan cryptids 2 Layer up high 3 Was an author 4 LeBron James’ squad 5 Opposed one 6 Thing on a hook 7 Large rural field 8 Covered with ooze 9 Thing in a well 10 Title used in Turkey 11 Winter toy 12 “Copacabana” figure

13 Presents posers 18 Poisonous flammable gas 19 Wins, barely 23 Very boring 25 Easy chair site 26 Response to “Shall we?”

28 Blade making waves 29 Hawaiian gala 30 Pupil site 31 Delany of TV 32 Movie headliner 33 Outstanding rating 34 Gator? No, close 36 Sign of boredom 39 Chain letters, to geneticists 40 Fronted, as a parade 41 Most factual 46 Black eye, slangily 47 British pantry items 49 Become prominent 51 Collection plate insert 53 Goose with a black neck 54 All birdy 55 Annoying gossiper

56 Fancy rims 57 Fit of shivering 58 Commando incursion 59 Tiny-castle flooder 60 Resistance figures 61 Ultimately better?

63 “High” drink

Solution to yesterday’s puzzle:

D4

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Image BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

How to just say no to gift exchanges

By Kelsey Sheehy

Y

NerdWallet

our college roommate. Your current roommate. Your book club. Your brunch crew. Your office secret Santa. Your cousins. Your siblings. Your parents. Your partner. Their parents.

As your social circle expands, so does your holiday shopping list. But what happens when you can’t really afford to buy gifts for everyone?

One option: Cut back on gift exchanges.

Opt out of the office secret Santa. Don’t give your child’s day-care provider a present. Tell your roommate/cousins/friends that you can’t exchange gifts this year.

This move may seem harsh, but if the alternative is going into debt, it could be the best move.

Last year 65 percent of millennial shoppers put gifts on their credit card. This year, roughly a third of them are still paying off that debt, according to an annual survey of holiday shoppers from NerdWallet.

CONSULT YOUR BUDGET Now is a good time to make a budget, if you don’t already have one. Factor in your normal expenses— rent or mortgage, groceries, bills, LaCroix and commuting costs—plus things like holiday travel and that ugly sweater bar crawl. Now you know what you have to spend on gifts this year.

PRIORITIZE YOUR GIFT LIST Your budget may allow for some gifts, but there’s a good chance you’ll need to make some cuts.

WORK SECRET SANTA This is a tricky one to navigate. One school of thought is to make the office exchange a priority.

“If there’s a work setting where everybody’s participating, you must participate,” says Jennifer Porter, a manners teacher and gift shop owner. “It shows goodwill. These are your colleagues. Pony up for that and feel good about it.”

But office size and dynamics come into play. If your office is large enough, you may be able to opt out without anyone noticing. Just don’t sign up. End of discussion.

It’s harder to bow out in a smaller office or team, especially if the whole group gets together for the gift-giving. If it’s simply not in your budget, talk to the

person organizing your office exchange.

“Let them know, so you don’t have to make a campaign about it,” says Elaine Swann, an etiquette expert and founder of The Swann School of Protocol.

You can spare them any extra details, Swann says, and spare yourself the need to tell all of your officemates.

Another option: Consider regifting that candle you got last year—you know, the one in your closet.

(Fun fact: 82 percent of millennials regift holiday presents, according to the survey from NerdWallet.)

FRIEND AND FAMILY GIFT EXCHANGES Your immediate family is likely on your must-gift list, but extended family may not make the cut. The same is true for your closest friends versus your larger friend group—book club, brunch club, bros club and so forth. It’s OK to ask to scale back things to fit your budget.

You don’t need to put up a front with your nearest and dearest. Remember, these are the people who know you best.

“You can be a little more frank and transparent,” Swann says. “If there’s anyone who’s going to understand, it will be those you have a close relationship with. They will understand and almost expect it.”

CHILD’S TEACHER, DAY-CARE PROVIDER In this instance, less is more. There’s no need to tell the teacher they won’t get a present from junior this year. A heartfelt note from you and your child will be cherished as much as another gift card or coffee mug, if not more.

HAVING ‘THE TALK’ If you decide to end or opt out of a gift exchange,

be honest and considerate. You want to halt the presents, not the relationship.

Don’t make up excuses or put off the conversation until a week before Christmas, Swann says.

“Be brutally honest, without being brutal,” she says. “Frankly say, ‘Thank you for thinking of me and wanting to include me, but I will not be able to participate.’ Resist the urge to overexplain.”

You’ll likely find people understand. In fact, they may even be relieved. Because, let’s face it, most of us are strapped for cash over the holidays.

But if they’re not OK with it, give them some space.

“Don’t try to fix it in that instance. Allow that person to go through the process of being disappointed,” Swann says. “Your role is not to get them over to your side. Your role is just to inform them of your intentions.” AP

Hope for stutterers and people with speech defects

As children grow older, they’re expected to outgrow their speech impediments. However, some difficulties, such as stuttering (the inability to speak, read and write) may actually be speech disorders that are carried over to adulthood.

While they may not always be easy to treat, they can be overcome, as proven by former stutterers Julia Roberts and Samuel L. Jackson, who rely on their ability to deliver lines as actors. Makati Medical Center (www.makatimed.net.ph), a top hospital in the Philippines, tackles various speech disorders through its Dr. Ariston G. Bautista ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) Center, a facility with the latest diagnostic tests to determine the possible cause of a patient’s speech challenges.

Emmanuel L. Ibay, MD, Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck Consultant, takes you through what you need to know about this

disorder and how it can be treated.

“Stuttering involves the repetition of sounds, syllables or words,” says Ibay. “It can also be characterized by the prolongation of sounds, and interruptions in speech called ‘blocks.’ Someone who stutters wants to say something but has trouble delivering words in a natural and smooth, flowing manner.”

There are two main types of stuttering: developmental and neurogenic.

Developmental stuttering, the more common form, often occurs in young children while they are still learning speech and language skills. Some scientists and clinicians believe that it develops when a child’s language abilities cannot meet their verbal demands, while others think it comes from complex interactions of multiple factors including genetics.

Neurogenic stuttering, on the other hand, may be the result of a stroke, head trauma, or other type of brain injury due to the brain’s difficulty in coordinating the various brain regions that affect speech.

“Stuttering was believed to be mostly psychogenic as a result of emotional trauma,” says Ibay. “However, today psychogenic stuttering is usually considered to be rare.”

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all cure for stuttering.

“Meeting with a doctor and speech-language pathologist to assess the patient’s individual needs allows us to create a personalized treatment plan,” he says. “Courses of action may include several ways of changing one’s attitude toward communication, including block modification, avoidance reduction therapy, fluency modification techniques and other psychological approaches.”

URC serves up youth’s future in a ‘BITE’ Universal Robina Corp. (URC) is giving engineering students an opportunity to be mentored by its technical experts through a five-day learning boot camp in January 2019. With the URC BITE (Business Insider Training Experience) program, college students can experience what it’s like to work in a food manufacturing company.

Get to know the ins and outs of operations in the URC plants to equip themselves with knowledge and experience that can help put all their learnings to practice.

URC BITE focuses on honing skills of future innovators and movers of society within five days of intensive and hands-on mentorship and activities. The program will expose BITE students to strategy-building and problem-solving activities based on actual manufacturing scenarios and case studies—mostly on environment and sustainability—that have occurred in URC plants.

Universal Robina Corp opens a five-day learning boot camp where engineering students can experience what it’s like to work in a food manufacturing company.

Aside from the learning opportunity, the program can also open doors for potential internships and future employment in one of the leading snack and beverage manufacturing companies in the country. The participants can even land a spot in URC’s Manufacturing Cadetship program.

The URC BITE program is open to Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemical Engineering graduating students from all over the country. Registration will end on December 15, and interested students can visit www2.urc.com.ph/bite for the step-by-step registration procedure.

Perfecting the art of scenting There is no signature more remarkable than a person’s scent—a sophisticated mixture of the explosion of the top notes, the subtlety of the mid notes, and the lingering presence of the base notes, all nuanced to a person’s lifestyle and skin acidity. But getting the right scent is not as easy as picking one off the shelves—there’s a science behind it that one must understand.

Scentsmith Perfumery, which means an expert on scents, offers the public just that—knowledge and leadership in the art of scents.

“Scents actually have the power to evoke emotions and moments based on our individual experiences. Just like how fresh linen sheets smells of home, or how wood is more masculine, every scent has a meaning for us. And that is what we want to bring through Scentsmith—an experience that goes beyond their sense of smell,” said Kristine Torres, brand manager of Scentsmith Perfumery.

Whether it is the smell of rain falling after a long summer or of freshly cut grass, or the scent of lavender or rose that was long pressed in the middle of a book, scents evokes emotions and feelings.

True to the origin of scenting, Scentsmith maintains a very transparent approach with its product line in simple, straightforward packaging, a clear list of its nontoxic ingredients, and basic no-frills bottles. The personal and home-care products of Scentsmith are formulated without parabens, SLES,

phthalate, mineral oil, petroleum, paraffin and DEA.

“Consumers these days are very conscious of what goes inside the products they use. But there are still a lot of people who do not understand how to get the proper scent that would suit their lifestyles best—a person who is exposed to high humidity cannot use the same perfume as someone who stays indoors the whole day,” said Abdon.

There is more to understand about scents and its power. Just take, for example, the acidity of a person’s skin or the lifestyles that they live.

The thing with scents is that it’s easily affected by various elements like heat which can come from the body or the environment.

Aside from perfumes, scents play an equally important role in making spaces more livable—home become more homey, offices can become more professional or less intimidating, and beds can become more inviting. One of the quirkier products of Scentsmith Perfumery are the Loo Drops, primarily used to keep the bathroom smelling fresh despite the incidents that may have occurred.

Inspired by how perfumeries were established in early times, Scentsmith uses amber-toned bottles to store its various product lines that ranges from fragrances, body care, hair care and home products. In development are travel, skin care and fragrances for the car.

Scentsmith Perfumery brings back the most essential in the art of scenting, a true understanding of the power of each scent.

BusinessMirror E1 | Wednesday, December 12, 2018 • Editor : Tet Andolong

MANDANI Bay Quay ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE

Megawide to build ₧10.1-billion waterfront project

By Roderick L. Abad

M

@rodrik_28

EGAWIDE Construction Corp. was recently awarded the engineering, procurement and construction or EPC contract for the P10.1-billion Mandani Bay Quay Phase 2, making the company surpass its target of P24 billion in new contracts this year.

“It is the largest contract for our construction segment that we have booked so far this year,” said Edgar Saavedra, chairman and CEO of Megawide.

Mandani Bay Quay is a premier waterfront development in Mandaue City, Cebu. Its second phase has a construction floor area of 328,000 square meters.

The development will include three 40-story residential towers, one 30-story office building, an amenities floor, two commercial levels and four floors of podium parking.

Construction will commence this year with the first tower, together with the amenities area, commercial spaces and parking levels, targeted for completion by the end of 2021.

The succeeding residential tow-

ers are due for delivery within the first half of 2022 and first quarter of 2023, respectively. Set for completion by the fourth quarter of 2022 is the office tower.

“Megawide is proud to be a partner of HTLand Inc. in the construction of the Mandani Bay Quay Phase 2,” the top executive said of their collaborator, a joint venture company of Hongkong Land and Taft Properties.

Saavedra noted that Megawide is solidifying its engineering footprint in Cebu with this large-scale, mixeduse development.

“It is truly a First World project and we are committed to delivering the highest standards of engineering and construction,” he said.

According to him, the firm will also be expanding the scale of its con-

struction operations in the Queen City of the South with the construction of Mandani Bay. “We are further strengthening our operational efficiency in the region. It will be a good complement to our airport operations and our other ongoing EPC projects in the area,” he stressed. Publicly listed Megawide is one of the most innovative infrastructure and engineering companies in the Philippines.

The engineering and infrastructure conglomerate is the private partner for infrastructure projects, such as the Mactan-Cebu International Airport (MCIA) and the Parañaque Integrated Terminal Exchange (PITX).

For the first nine months of the year, the company posted a net income of P1.720 billion compared with P1.715 billion in the same period last year.

Combined revenues amounted P12.75 billion, with the construction business accounting for 81 percent and the airport business contributing 19 percent.

From January to September 2019, Megawide reported that the awarded new contracts reached to P16.8 billion, 55 percent more than new contracts secured for the full year of 2017.

“Our prospects in the EPC business remain very bullish as we continue to expand our order book levels and ensure revenue visibility for the next two to three years,” Saavedra said.

ROOM on the penthouse floor ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE

ROOM on the garden floor ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE

MANDANI Bay lobby ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE

ROOM on the standard floor ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE

Business

E2 Wednesday, December 12, 2018

DIGITAL REALTY: THE NEW REALITY IN REAL ESTATE lord. Our early growth was across the United States, into Europe via Dublin and then in to Asia Pacific via Singapore. The changes that enabled this growth is quite simple, “Data.” A tsunami of it. Every year is getting larger and larger.

Technology companies, financial organizations, telecom/network providers and a whole range of other organizations needed the physical environment to house more and more servers for their data—securely, safely and with a provider they could trust. This is how we grew, with some very large global clients expanding across geographies. This trend continues today, with regional organizations growing their data footprint across the globe. I always like to put things in perspective. For example, 90 percent of the entire data we have in the world today was created in just the last two years! It is estimated that here are 2.5+ quintillion bytes of data created every day on the Earth, but we are still only at the start of the tsunami—connected devices are going to make things even more interesting in the coming decade.

Amor Maclang

FIRST DIBS IN REAL ESTATE

W

Part One

DIGITAL Loyang Way, Singapore It features a robust power architecture that delivers 13.2 MW of critical IT capacity and provides customers with multi-rack, cage and private suite configurations ranging from 2kW to over 1.2 MW.

HEN I was in Mumbai last week to be one of the keynotes at the Marketing Technology Conference, I ran across a very interesting keynote called Digital Guanxi from Omer Wilson, the marketing head of Digital Realty, Asia Pacific.

Because I was extremely deprived of sleep, having arrived just at 3 a.m. of the same day, I thought his business was named Digital Reality.

Thinking it was a digital marketing company, I reached out for potential collaboration with the Philippines only to be pleasantly surprised that his business was a game changer in one of the fields I love, real estate.

Digital Realty is the world’s largest (by physical size) owner, developer and operator of data centers— the world’s biggest digital landlord.

A leader in real estate

IT is the fifth-largest publicly traded US REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust). It is also the sixth-largest purchaser of renewable energy in the United States. Digital Realty supports the data center, colocation and interconnection strategies of more than 2,300 firms across its secure, network-rich portfolio of data centers throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Digital Realty’s clients include domestic and international companies of all sizes, ranging from cloud and information technology services, communications and social networking to financial services, manufacturing, energy, health care and consumer

3. Are you more of a technology or a real-estate company? Technology and real estate seem anathema to each other, is it a happy marriage?

products. Digital Realty has delivered the most reliable uptime of any other DC operator for the past 11 years.

of ours, that at the end of the day, “people like to buy from people that they also like and trust.” In previous times the distinction between B2C and B2B marketing was quite clear, i.e., the channels were separate. Over the past decade, everything has been blurred, especially with the reach and targeting offered to marketers through the multiple digital and social-media channels. If you think about it, a B2B decision maker doesn’t switch off from his business decisions when he is on “nonbusiness” social-media channels. At the end of the day, I believe the skill needed to be successful in marketing remains the same. Connect with the buyer, on an individual basis, and sell them something with emotion, sell them the dream.

On thought leadership, I am very passionate about technology and

where it is taking the human race. I love to talk about how this era, the one we are living in right now, is quite possibly the most unique in the entire history of humankind. That’s pretty intense to think about.

Great question. We were formed in 2004 in Silicon Valley, during the early dot com boom era. It was a time when the tech giants that we all know so well today were still growing—we basically helped them grow. We were their physical footprint, their digital infrastructure layer, the world’s digital land-

We are both. At our core, we are a real-estate company, in fact the fifth-largest publicly traded US REIT. However, the specific area we operate within is all about technology. We only build, own and operate data centers—that is our expertise.

We really started the “Outsourced data center” industry from 2004 onwards. Our clients are some of the world’s largest technology organizations, and their demands are all around enabling their data and technology footprint globally. Although technology and real estate may well seem like an anathema to each other, in our instance, it is a very happy marriage. We are like the photosynthesis layer of a leaf, within our borders all the amazing technology which enables how each of us works, lives and plays resides—our job is to ensure it is always online, secure and safe, which we have successfully performed for more years than any other operator. We actually achieved “five nines” of uptime for the 11th consecutive year last year—exceeding 99.999 percent availability throughout 2017 of our data centers for customers. To, again, put this into perspective, we surpassed 1.7 billion operating minutes across all our global data centers.

worth of Home Entertainment Showcase; Ria Palafox, who bagged more than P200,000 worth of Home Appliance Showcase; Jeanette Gascon and her P160,000 worth of Home Appliance Showcase and; Catherine Sescon, who said “I was both nervous and excited, and I got confused as to what box I will bag or drop. I just left it all to God, and thank God I got lucky,” was easily the biggest and proudest winner with a massive P250,000 take-home, also of a Home Appliance Showcase.

It was total excitement in the air as each of the four winners took turns in playing the “Bag It or Drop It” game, hosted by popular radio jock and TV personality, Sam YG. The game started with 25 identical

bags, where each bag comes with an appliance as a prize. The players must select a numbered bag at random, and the goal was to grab the best offer or keep the bag and what’s the prize inside it Each player’s turn was indeed nerve-wracking for the throng of people who waited with bated breaths as to whether they will “Bag It” or “Drop It.” In the end, it was all heart-pounding excitement from the first to the last winner.

“The ‘Bag It or Drop It’ promo was part of our customer-engagement activities that involved customer participation. “We are doing these types of event to make our customers feel that they are involved in whatever activities we do,” explains Jovito Santos, Group

general manager of Robinsons Appliances Corp.

Santos added that their promotional activities will continue to 2019, and likewise announced that Robinsons Appliances will be having the second set of its “Race to a Minute” raffle promo this November.

The “Bag-It or Drop-It” game was held in partnership with Robinsons Appliances’s trusted partner brands.

At present, Robinsons Appliances operates close to 100 branches in key locations nationwide.

For more details about Robinsons Appliances and its array of home appliances and other products, visit www.robinsonsappliances. com.ph or follow them on their official Facebook Page www.facebook. com/robinsonsappliances.ph.

A leader in renewable-energy consumption

DIGITAL Realty has also been recognized by the US EPA for its sustainability leadership, ranking among the top 30 green power users in the technology and telecom industries, and was recently named a 2018 Green Lease Leader by the Institute for Market Transformation and the Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Alliance at the BOMA Expo. Digital Realty has executed contracts to procure 184 megawatts of renewable energy annually. This will reduce the company’s carbon footprint by approximately 536,000 metric tons per year.

The environmental benefits from this agreement will have an impact comparable to taking 114,000 cars off the road each year, equivalent to the energy needs of more than 57,000 homes per year.

In Mumbai, I had a chat with DR’s main marketing man, Omer Wilson, and we chatted about Iran, Kubrick and, of course, real estate.

Some excerpts:

OMER WILSON, head of marketing for Digital Realty, Asia Pacific

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Your approach to B2B marketing, thought leadership?

My name is Omer Wilson, and I head up Marketing across Asia Pacific for Digital Realty, the world’s largest owner, developer and operator of data centers. I am based out of the Singapore regional HQ, having previously worked in a similar role for Digital from the EMEA regional HQ in London. I have always been a marketer, starting straight from University on to the IBM Global Graduate Scheme for Marketing. From there I have been fortunate enough to be in technology, real-estate, consulting and media industry-related marketing leadership positions, including a time in e-commerce start-ups.

I am a very strong believer in selling to people. We sometimes forget, especially in this data-driven world

‘Bag It or Drop It’ A

SAM YG (host) (from left), Donna San Luis (Robinsons Appliances, Marketing Services manager), Sheina Galindo (Robinsons Appliances, Marketing officer), Catherine Sescon (fourth player, Butuan), Jeanette Gascon (third player, Iloilo), Loida Lanzaga (first player, Antipolo), Rica Palafox (second player, Bulacan) at the recent Robinsons Appliances Antipolo “Bag It or Drop It” game show.

TOTAL of four people went home grinning from ear to ear after winning a whopping combined total of more than P700,000 worth of home appliances during the thrilling “Bag It or Drop It” game event held recently in Antipolo City.

The four winners from Metro Manila, Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao bagged various appliance showcases awarded by Robinsons Appliances during the culminating event of the much-anticipated “Bag It or Drop It” game. The game was the culmination of the “Bag It or Drop It” raffle promo organized by Robinsons Appliances for its loyal Robinsons Rewards Card members.

The happy winners were Loida Lanzaga, who bagged P110,000

2. Almost a decade ago, the reason for being for Digital Realty did not exist, yet now, it’s one of the highest-valued real-estate companies. What were the changes in the past decade that brought this about?

sMirror

Wednesday, December 12, 2018 E3

Filinvest projects recognized by Lamudi

Engineering giant urges the government to enhance infra development

OLIVIER CHRISTOPHE COQUEREL, President and country managing director of ABB in the Philippines

T

CLAREMONT clubhouse

F

ILINVEST Land Inc. (FLI), one of the country’s largest real-estate developers, takes pride as Lamudi recognized two of its projects in the second year of The Outlook by Lamudi.

Sorrento Oasis in Pasig City was hailed as the Best Value for Money Condo Development of the year for Luzon, while Claremont in Pampanga was awarded the Best Affordable House of the year for Luzon.

Other Filinvest projects were also highly commended by Lamudi—Timberland Heights in San Mateo, Rizal; The Veranda at Kembali in Samal Island, Davao; and Marina Town in Dumaguete. Lamudi is a global real-estate marketplace that offers an easy-to-use platform to find or list properties online.

Following the success of its launch last year, The Outlook by Lamudi honored the leading industry projects and developers of the Philippines as selected by an esteemed panel of judges and based on a survey participation of over 10,000 active property seekers.

In a separate statement, Filinvest

greens and resort-style amenities for relaxation and living spaces for comfort and security to complete the residents living and leisure experience Sorrento Oasis is the only medium-rise community in the area along the highly accessible, wide avenue of C. Raymundo. Its strategic location puts you within a convenient distance from your essential needs.

said that the company appreciates Lamudi for spearheading an event that showcased the best of the best in the Philippine real-estate industry. It added that the recognition for its projects is a testament to its vision of building the Filipino dream by offering homes for each market segment. To date, FLI has built almost 200 residential developments across the country.

Claremont

CLAREMONT is an exclusive, modern Asian-themed subdivision under the Futura brand by Filinvest, the company’s value homes.

It boasts of comfortable metropolitan lifestyle that is close to nature. Strategically located near the Clark Special Economic Zone, it maintains a peaceful ambiance and gives families a picturesque view of Mount Arayat and the majestic mountain ranges of Luzon.

Claremont offers a safe neighborhood, gated community, quality residential units, recreational amenities and facilities to help families live in comfort every day. These features set Claremont apart from other affordable housing projects, making it an ideal family home.

Sorrento Oasis

SORRENTO Oasis, a residential development under the Aspire brand

by Filinvest, boasts of charming Italian-themed building design inspired by the Italian town of Sorrento, renowned for its refreshing environs, breathtaking sunsets and the rejuvenating fragrance of its citrus groves. Similar to other Oasis projects across the nation, Sorrento Oasis follows Aspire’s signature features, such as wide

www.filinvest.com

SORENTO Oasis

ACTIVA TO SPUR STRONG BUSINESS GROWTH IN QUEZON CITY

By Leony R. Garcia

C

UBAO, one of the oldest business districts in the country, is set for a grand transformation soon with the rise of Activa, a mixed-use development seamlessly integrates a lifestyle mall, offices and BPOs, hotel and residential condominium.

Activa is one of Gotianun-led Filinvest projects, which offers a holistic live-work-play lifestyle. A dynamic, refreshing and chic concept, the development’s wide variety of components complement a slew of well-appointed amenities for both business and residential buildings—making Activa an ideal place where one can thrive.

The 1-hectare property is situated at the corner of Edsa and Aurora Boulevard in Cubao, Quezon City.

Activa’s enviable location provides close proximity to various central business districts, commercial centers, health and wellness hubs, educational institutions, places of worship, and other office developments in the Metro.

Activa is also conveniently connected to the north and south of Metro Manila via Edsa, while the east and west is easily reachable via Aurora Boulevard. Aside from this, Activa also boasts of being a transit-oriented development, being accessible to various city and provincial bus stations and to the

By Rizal Raoul S. Reyes @brownindio

two main train lines—MRT and LRT. It is also commuter-friendly with the planned bus lay-by, taxi stands, vehicle pickup points and pedestrian link to the train stations.

Mixed-use lifestyle

ACTIVA Flex, the development’s 24-story building, is comprised of 40 Compound Office units, 112± Regular Office units and 168± versatile SoHo units. With unit size ranging from 20± square meter to 240± sq m, Activa Flex provides the much-needed space for flexibility and functionality.

Ideal for start-ups to mediumsized firms, Activa Flex’s units with

small office home office spaces grant forward-looking entrepreneurs the flexibility and convenience of living and working in one place, all within a master-planned cityscape. Each unit is equipped with fiber-optic cable and telecommunications backbone for high-speed connectivity. It also features six high-speed elevators, providing efficiency and convenience to its occupants.

Activa Office Tower is another key component in this development.

It boasts of 14-story typical office floors ideal for BPOs and knowledge-based companies. Similar to Activa Flex, this office tower is also equipped with fiber-optic cable

and telecommunications backbone for high-speed connectivity. It also boasts of acquiring a Gold LEED pre-certification, a rating system that aims to accelerate the development and implementation of “green” building practices. The office tower will likewise feature N+1 emergency back-up power and a rooftop garden that will offer a splendid view of the city’s skyline.

Other components of this mixeduse concept are the hotel, mall and residential condo—Activa Hotel will feature 11 premium floors with 200± well-appointed rooms, all-day dining, function rooms and rooftop amenities, such as an infinity

pool, sunset bar, fitness center and a themed café.

Activa Mall, on the other hand, is a five-level shopping and leisure complex with a retail podium, specialty retail establishments, al-fresco area, food hall, cinema, supermarket, wellness hubs, fashion boutiques and digital establishments.

A residential component is also in the pipeline. It is envisioned to be a 32-story premium residential units that provide efficient and functional living spaces suited for young professionals, newly married couples, and start-up families, even for those looking for a sound and productive investment. It will also feature 4 high-speed elevators, infinity pool, sky terrace with barbeque deck and a fitness gym.

Now on its construction stage, buyers can enjoy investment growth until the project reaches completion.

Activa recognizes the need for everything to be within reach in this age of rapid advancement. For this purpose, Activa has put together the essentials that make a seamless mixed-use development—the convenience of condo living, the flexibility of being in a modern workplace set in an ideal location, and the revelry in its entertainment and leisure components.

Know more about Activa and other Filinvest projects by visiting www.filinvest.com.ph.

HE local subsidiary of the Swiss-Swedish engineering company urged the government to ramp up its infrastructure projects to help develop the local economy to catapult into progress.

“With the Philippines experiencing rapid population growth and continuous expansion of businesses, the country needs to improve its infrastructure,” said Olivier Christophe Coquerel, president and country managing director ABB in the Philippines in a recent interview with the BusinessMirror.

In the World Economic Forum Index 2017-2018, inadequate supply of infrastructure was ranked the second most problematic factors for doing business in the Philippines. As a result of the country’s poor infrastructure, Manila is not getting a big number of investors to boost job generation and investments.

Coquerel said the company is also interested to participate in the government’s “Build, Build, Build” program particularly in the construction of power plants.

He said ABB Philippines offers power and automation solutions which are now available upon the needs of the clients. He added the company is ready to assist companies that are transitioning into the digital technology. “We have more than 180 solutions that can be deployed to clients anytime when needed.”

ABB is the company’s unified, cross-industry, digital offering— from device edge to cloud — with devices, systems, solutions, services and a platform that enable the customers to achieve higher operating efficiencies.

Through its ABB Life Expectancy Analysis Program (ABB LEAP), Coquerel said power plants can now craft maintenance plans to make the plants more efficient reduce downtime.

Coquerel said ABB Ability has also an early warning capability maintenance planning. It has optimized maintenance planning that allows a company to move from time-based to condition-based maintenance.

Under its reduced cost of ownership feature, Coquerel leads in decision-making aspects on shortand long-term maintenance and run/repair/retrofit/replace options and pushes on improved risk mitigation to minimize unplanned downtime by reducing risk level.

Furthermore, the ABB Ability solutions are focusing on cloudbased data and analytics from clients to give them real-time analyses. “Smart sensors provide information to the technicians to ensure the customer they are operating the proper budget,” he said. “We do a lot of studies on what needs to be done in big projects such as airports and government buildings, hotels, casinos,” he said.

“ABB also wants to join in developing green projects as it is high time to pursue sustainability in construction projects.”

Entrepreneur BusinessMirror

E4 Wednesday, December 12, 2018

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Good customer relations propel Project T Solutions’s rapid growth in the business

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By Rizal Raoul S. Reyes

Targeting the young

@brownindio

DACULA recalled that it was a challenge, as Project T did not have an office in their fledgling days, conducting meetings in coffee shops.

Nevertheless, the troika of Hong, Dacula and IT director Kevin Cabrera persevered in building the company composed of a big majority of millennials and Generation Z. Dacula said Project T also plans to add more physical activities, such as table tennis, to its game area where clients can recharge while playing arcade and family computers. The workspace also has shower areas and sleeping quarters for power naps.

Contributor

OR Project T Solutions, a company that offers serviced office and coworking space in the central business district of Metro Manila, establishing a very good customer relationship is the ultimate key to success.

“It is really developing relationships, and the way we treat each other as family, [that is] behind the rapid growth of Project T,” the company’s vice president, Nicole Dacula, said, adding they also intently listen to customers’ suggestions and recommendations.

At a news conference during the opening of their second office in the Bonifacio Global City, Taguig, Alvin Terrence Hong, the chief executive officer of Project T, said the early years of the company were very challenging, to say the least.

Tough start

“THE first three months were quite tough, from branding to the marketing. For the first six months, we were

trying to find our niche, while the sales team was facing challenges in pitching to clients, and we were also busy in fixing other problems,” said Hong. Hong said he and his team decided to enter the workplace business because of the vast opportunities it offers. In the Philippines alone, start-ups are seen to increase five-fold from 100 by 2020, according to the government’s “Philippine Roadmap for Digital Startups 2015 and Beyond.”

In its second building, strategically located at Twenty-Five Seven McKinley, Hong said the twoyear-old Project T further strives to provide a new meaning of work and office as people get detached from home and from the beautiful

(FROM left) Nicole Dacula, Alvin Terence Hong and Kevin Cabrera

pleasures in life, while logging in more and more hours in making their dreams into reality.

The goals

IN its newest site, Hong said, Project T now offers flexible workspaces that combine the comforts of home and the efficiency of an ideal workplace that make people more energized and creative at work.

Its bigger 500-seater workspace features new amenities, including a gym with traditional exercise equipment and newer machines that target the whole body. Project T’s second baby also has a bigger room that easily converts into a fitness studio

where clients can do Zumba and Yoga, including a weight-loss project for their employees.

“The goal is to be healthier, so it will be easier for you to do your work without worries. We do Zumba every Tuesdays, but it will be done more religiously here because of the bigger space. It’s an approach to make sure it’s a more holistic space for employees and clients,” said Dacula.

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Philippine exhibitors are Asia Integrated Machine Inc., Asia Packaging, Automation & Resources Systems Inc., Bengar Industrial Corp. Benison Corp., Buhler Ag Philippine Representative Office, CLP Industries Co., Conveying ad Packaging Co. Inc., Deokma Eight Trading Inc., Elgie Packaging Equipment Inc. Elixir Industrial Equipment Inc., Faustino V. Salvador III, Formway Trading & Services Inc., Fuji Machinery Co. Ltd., G. Magnetics Industrial Systems Inc., Global Specialty Resource, Grains Innovation and Solutions Co. Inc., Handyware Philippines Inc., Imaforni Int’l S.P.A., Indofine International, Industrial Machinery Applicare Corp., Innoprocess Enterprises, Integral Industrial Management Corp., Integrated Factory Automation Inc., Interroll (Asia) Pte. Ltd., Ishida Co. Ltd., Jnh Trading Co., Jss Machinery, JTB, Jupp & Co. Inc., Krirub Industrial Sales, Loopex Packaging Products Inc., LPI Rack-Range Phils. Corp., Megajoy Power Solutions Inc., Modudrive Industrial, Nationwide Distributors Inc., Pamav Training Institute & Technology Center Inc., Platinum International Supply and Services, Poweredge Solutions Phils. Inc., Primera 7 Technical Ventures Inc., Radialpro Trading Inc., Scale-ink Automation Inc., Shrinkpack Philippines Corp., Technodyene Industries Inc., Tonelli Group, Topack Co. Ltd., UCIMA Association, VCP Trading International Corp., Versa Group Philippines Corp., Victorious Team Provider Corp., Water-Chem Solutions Industries Inc. and Westco Electrical & Equipment Corp.

Taking part in the exhibition are also Japan’s 3A System Corp., Advance Riken Co. Ltd., Creo Co. Ltd., EDM Corp., Elgie Packaging Equipment Inc., Fuji Machinery Co. Ltd., Fuji Yosoko Kogyo Co. Ltd., General Packerco. Ltd., Hattori Seisakusho Co. Ltd., Flitec, Ishida

Co. Ltd., Kyoto Seisakusho Co. Ltd., Maruyasu Kikai Co. Ltd., Moki Co. Ltd., Paionia Furyokuki Co. Ltd., System Square Inc., Topack Co. Ltd. and Toyo Jidoki Co. Ltd. Participating companies from China are Alan Machinery Import & Export Co. Ltd., Flexi Label Packaging, Fujian Mayer CNC Science & Technology Co. Ltd., Fujian Xiangda Canmaking Co. Ltd., Golden Eagle Can Making Machinery Import & Export Ltd., Jiangsu Kaiyi Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd., Klockner Pentaplast (Suzhou) Specialty Materials Co. Ltd., Kunshan Samwin Packaging Technology Co. Ltd., Ningbo Estes Intelligent Equipment Co. Ltd., Shanghai Changlong Industrial Equipment Co. Ltd., Shanghai Plastlink Transmission Equipment Co. Ltd., Siad Engineering (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd., Ruwac Industrial Vacuums (Suzhou) Co., Ltd., Siad Engineering Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Techik Instrument (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Tianshui Huayuan Pharmaceutical Equipment Technology Co. Ltd. and Wolf (Hangzhou) Packaging Machining Co. Ltd. From Singapore are Aegis Packaging Pte Ltd., Bireme Group Pte. Ltd., Clearpack Singapore Pte. Ltd., Eastern Trade Media Pte. Ltd., Flexco, Igus, Interroll (Asia) Pte. Ltd., Miura Singapore Co. Pte. Ltd., Ruwac Private Ltd., Ruwac Sdn. Bhd. and Schenck Process Pte. Ltd. Also joining are Azo Ltd., Bak Asia Co. Ltd., Cargo Perfect Co. Ltd., Delmax Machinery Co. Ltd., FPT Food Process Technology Co. Ltd., Hydro Air, Klockner Pentaplast (Thailand) Ltd., Lpi Enterprises Co. Ltd., Mahatanee Industrial Co. Ltd., Patkol Public Co. Ltd., Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supply Co. Ltd., Platinum Pro Plastic Co. Ltd., ST Merchandise, Thai Plaspac, TNA Asia Ltd., Tridentpack and Engineering Co. Ltd., Winner Inter Plas Co. Ltd.

and X-per Technia (Thailand) Co. Ltd. Coming from Malaysia are Dorner (M) Sdn Bhd / Flex Move, Eonmetall Sytems Sdn Bhd, Hiroyuki, Involvo, Netfill, See Hau Global Sdn Bhd, and Solutionpack Machinery (M) Sdn Bhd. Food Machinery Industrial Corp., Pisko Engineering Co. Ltd., Power Wrap Corp. and SDB Corp. from South Korea; Ever Roll Machinery Co. Ltd., Extend Great International Corp., Global Specialty Resource, KWT Machine Systems Co. Ltd., Power Wrap Corp., Taiwan Benefit (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., and Wu-hsing Electronics Co. Ltd. from Taiwan; Ringier Trade Media Ltd. / Food Pacific Manufacturing Journal from Hong Kong; Sunpet from India; and PT Merkindo Rekateknikfrom Indonesia will also be present at ProPak Philippines. Also joining ProPak Philippines are Heat and Control from Australia; Blentech, Chester-Jensen Co. Inc., and Quicklabel System from the United States; and Israel’s Quality

by Vision Ltd. Also among the international exhibitors are Amp Rose, Jacob White Packaging Ltd., Meech, OPEN DATE, PPMA Ltd., Russell Finex Ltd. and Travtec, all from the United Kingdom; Germany-based companies Calvatis Gmbh, Diamat Maschinenbau Gmbh, Fessmann, Foodlogistik, Frontmatec Hygiene Gmbh, FREY, Fuchs Lubritech Gmbh, Handtmann, Henneken Maschinebau, Hosokawa Alpine Aktiengesellschaft, Inmatec Gastechnologie Gmbh & Co. KG, Inotec, K+G Wetter, Komet, Logopak Systeme Gmbh&co Kg, Miho Inspektionssysteme Gmbh, Modernpack Hoppe Gmbh, Ruhle, SLA Software Logistik Artland Gmbh, Tipper Tie, Treif and VC999; and Dansk Industri, Dantech, Detectronic, Essentia Protein Solutions, Jeros, Jimco, Lachenmeier and Scanbelt from Denmark.

PWD-managed food store to open in Alaminos City

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LAMINOS CITY, Pangasinan—Persons with disabilities (PWDs) in this city will open their very own healthy food stores at the Lucap Wharf here on December 14.

The store, to be called “Pangasinan Food Store, a one-stop shop,” is a project of the city government of Alaminos and the Departments of

Labor and Employment, Trade and Industry and Science and Technology for the city’s PWDs, city information officer Venus Balgua said in a recent interview.

“The project was funded by the Department of Labor with P500,000 for the store’s capital, while the stall is the counterpart of the city government,” Balgua said.

The Pangasinan Entrepreneur Development Association Inc. will supply the products to be sold at the store. Balgua added that PWDs who are members of the organization in the city will manage the store as their source of income.

“We encourage tourists to buy products from the store. They will be selling healthy variety of foods, like

ASIDE from the additional amenities, Project T also boasts of its Internet capability that enables sharing of connection between its two buildings and maximizes the speed to over 250 Mbps in the second building.

Cabrera, for his part, said a robust Internet connectivity is a crucial part of their business, which he believes ensured Project T’s success in two

We had a client who started with just a virtual office just for the business address.”—Hong

ProPak Asia PHL trade event slated from Jan. 24 to 26 at WTC in Pasay ROPAK, one of the biggest processing and packaging trade shows in the world, finally comes to the Philippines from January 24 to 26 at the World Trade Center (WTC) in Pasay City.

Following the success of the 26th ProPak Asia 2018 in Bangkok, Thailand, in June, the trade event seeks to elevate and innovate the country’s expanding manufacturing and supplying industries by connecting leading local and international suppliers to local and regional businesses, stakeholders and other industry players.

Supported by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Packaging Institute of the Philippines, Philippine Association of Food Technologists, Inc., Dairy Confederation of the Philippines, Production Management Association of The Philippines, Philippine Printing Technical Foundation and Association of Laguna Food Processors Inc., ProPak Philippines will showcase new technology, machinery and solutions, especially for the food, beverages and pharmaceutical sectors.

The trade event aligns with the DTI’s objective to further develop production, quality, food safety and supply of micro, small and medium enterprises in the country. Through the Philippine edition of ProPak, the organizers hope to meet the growing needs of the Philippines’s processing and manufacturing industries.

The show is expected to bring in over 180 exhibitors from 17 countries, namely the Philippines, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, Japan, India, Malaysia, Australia, Denmark, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with 10 international pavilions from across the globe. The event is also anticipating to attract over 6,000 trade visitors.

Power of Internet

chips or snacks that are organic and other products or things they might be needing before proceeding to the islands,” she said.

Balgua added that the project will be a great help to the PWDs who have a difficult time finding employment.

“Through this, they would be able to sustain their needs and [those of] their families,” she said. PNA

years. “Our Internet service really has given us the edge, and that’s the area where we invest heavily. We have server rooms where clients can also put their own.”

“The Internet alone is over 250 Mbps, which is not typical. I can sleep overnight and feel secure that our clients will be okay,” Cabrera said.

In-house technicians are also available 24/7 to prevent online interruptions. Project T also capitalizes on the building’s tight security in all its rooms with their biometricsenabled doors.

‘Built-to-suit’

AT present, Project T has a lineup of clients of both older and younger businesspeople as a testament to the quality of its workplace where clients can also find new business opportunities through its 10 business services, such as registration, payroll, recruitment and built-tosuit program.

Hong said Project T benefited from foreign investors who wanted to test the waters in the Philippines.

Through built-to-suit, clients can pick an office space from lists prepared by Project T and draw its own design. Contracts are negotiated to be paid on installment. “We had a client who started with just a virtual office just for the business address,” he shared.

How a Belgian billionaire built a fortune with wealthy friends

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LBERT FRERE spent his life creating one of Europe’s largest fortunes. It’s also one of the continent’s most complex.

The Belgian billionaire, who died at age 92, controlled a dizzying array of holding companies built up over more than 50 years, while partnering with some of the world’s wealthiest families on deals. It saw the investor exert an influence far beyond the scope of his $5.7-billion fortune.

“Albert was an extraordinary man and a truly exceptional entrepreneur,” Bernard Arnault, chief executive officer of LVMH, said in a news statement. “Throughout our 35 years of faithful friendship, we forged extremely close ties, both personal and professional.”

Frere nurtured other deep relationships around the globe, including business dealings with the Canadian Desmarais family that date back almost four decades. He also traded with Italy’s Agnelli clan and the German Mohn family. In 2014 he partnered with Thomas Schmidheiny of Switzerland, Nassef Sawiris of Egypt and Russia’s Filaret Galchev in the merger of Lafarge and Holcim, which created the world’s biggest cement maker.

Frere’s most visible sway was centered around investment holding company Groupe Bruxelles Lambert SA, Europe’s second-largest listed investment company whose €19 billion ($22 billion) of net assets include stakes in shoemaker Adidas AG and drinks provider Pernod Ricard SA, as well as LafargeHolcim Ltd. Frere controlled GBL through another listed company, Pargesa Holding SA, which owns a 50-percent stake. He controlled Pargesa through a 56-percent stake in Parjointco NV, a Dutch holding company that Frere jointly controlled with the Desmarais family. That partnership meant Frere’s $1.7-billion stake in Pargesa gave him control of GBL, whose market capitalization stands at $14.8 billion.

“Albert Frere was instrumental in the development of GBL and Pargesa, and we will be forever grateful to him,” Andre Desmarais said in a statement.

FRERE

Frere’s empire stretched beyond GBL. Holding company Groupe Frere-Bourgeois, wholly owned by his family, has net assets of €5.5 billion, according to its web site.

That includes about a $900-million stake in energy company Total SA and Cie. Nationale a Portefeuille, a closely held investment company with net assets of about €2 billion, including Bordeaux vineyard Chateau Cheval Blanc.

Frere owned the esteemed Premier Cru estate with Arnault. The relationship between the Belgian magnate and France’s richest person extended back decades. Frere served as a director at LVMH, and their families were said to vacation together in the French Alps and Morocco. Arnault’s ties to Frere were rumored to be one reason why the LVMH founder sought Belgian citizenship in 2012.

Such partnerships should endure beyond his death. The agreement with the Desmarais family over the two clan’s equal control of GBL runs until 2029, according to a 2018 company filing. His son Gerald Frere, 67, is chairman of Groupe Bruxelles Lambert and vice chairman of Pargesa. Frere’s daughter, Segolene Gallienne, 41, sits on the board of both companies.

Even in his 90s, Frere continued to move markets. News of GBL’s purchase of a stake in fashion house Burberry Group Plc. last year sent the shares soaring and when he sold in May, the stock tumbled. The transaction generated a $100-million capital gain for GBL. Bloomberg News