Businessmirror september 26, 2016

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Monday, September 26, 2016 Vol. 11 No. 352

Tax reforms to boost purchasing power n

By Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz

W

@joveemarie

hile the Duterte administration is seriously considering the proposal to lower personal income-tax (PIT) rates, the public should also be prepared to face its consequences as the government is also planning to impose additional taxes on several commodities.

INSIDE

PERSPECTIVE

Traversing PPPs is like a ‘Spartan Race’. Aroo!

₧500

PPP Lead Alberto C. Agra

The fixed rate that would be paid by workers earning P250,000 or less

Under the Department of Finance (DOF) working draft bill on lowering PIT, seen being authored

by Speaker Pantaleon D. Alvarez, See “Tax reforms,” A2

BMReports

Issues at stake in U.S. presidential election

P25.00 nationwide | 5 sections 36 pages | 7 days a weekt

Amid hardships in jail, political prisoners seek hope under Duterte administration e1

The ‘Maximize Profits’ Trap in DecisionMaking

spartan.com

media partner of the year

2015 environmental Media Award leadership award 2008

H

ow similar is the process involved in public-private partnerships (PPPs) with a “Spartan Race”, an obstacle-course run? What are the “obstacles” of a PPP program and project? How easy or how difficult is it to have a successful PPP and to complete an obstacle-ridden race?

Continued on A14

Continued on A14

monday morning

BM DOMINATES 25TH EJAP JOURNalism AWARDS, BAGS BUSINESS NEWS SOURCE TITLE

e1

Rooney dropped as Mourinho makes statement

Hundreds of protesters gather for a rally near the Presidential Palace to commemorate the 44th anniversary of the imposition of martial law by the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos on September 21 in Manila. The protesters, including some of the martial-law victims, are calling on President Duterte to release hundreds of political prisoners, and called on the people to “unite with all victims of human-rights violations and grave abuses during the dark days of the Marcos regime.” AP

By Jonathan L. Mayuga @jonlmayuga

sports

c4

F

Part One

ORTY-FOUR years after the declaration of martial law, hundreds of political detainees—suspected insurgents, activists and alleged sympathizers who were arrested by authorities remain incarcerated.

PESO exchange rates n US 47.8350

Staff and officials of non-governmental organizations Karapatan and Samahan ng Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensyon at Aresto (Selda) said that, while they welcome the release of a number of political prisoners recently, the motivation of the Duterte administration is still suspect.

Hundreds more remain incarcerated in various jails, living under

inhumane conditions and suffering from old age or various ailments, according to Dianne de Chavez, spokesman of Karapatan-Southern Tagalog. Many have been arrested after then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law in 1972, de Chavez said.

Many of those arrested were charged with trumped-up charges,

By VG Cabuag

@villygc

Y

OU’RE holding a copy of the newspaper cited as the Best Business News Source of the year at the 25th Journalism Awards of the Economic Journalists Association of the Philippines (Ejap). The BusinessMirror bagged this top prize, with four of its reporters winning the Best Reporter of the Year award in their respective beats.

The BusinessMirror was named best news source of the year after bagging four of the nine awards at stake at the awarding ceremonies on September 23.

This is the first time that the business daily won the award— considered the “Oscars” of the Philippine journalism industry— in the history of the newspaper founded in 2005 by the late Ambassador Antonio L. Cabangon Chua.

Continued on A3

Continued on A2

n japan 0.4749 n UK 62.5825 n HK 6.1683 n CHINA 7.1753 n singapore 35.2765 n australia 36.5555 n EU 53.6135 n SAUDI arabia 12.7584

Source: BSP (23 September 2016 )

A2 Monday, September 26, 2016

BMReports BusinessMirror

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Amid hardships in jail, political prisoners seek hope under Duterte administration Continued from A1

denied bail and are forced to live under inhuman conditions in prison, she added.

Charges filed against political detainees range from rebellion to “criminalized” charges of multiple murder, murder and illegal possession of firearms.

“Until now, we are waiting for the release of the remaining political detainees,” de Chavez said. “We continue to call on the Duterte administration to fulfil his promise to release all political prisoners, especially those who are old and suffering from various ailments.”

Because the government do not recognize the nature of their incarceration or their arrest, political detainees are living with ordinary criminals, she said.

Released

THE Selda said based on their account, 22 political detainees have

Tax reforms. . .

Continued from A1

the tax shall be computed in accordance with and at the rates established in two schedules. For 2018, the new tax brackets are: ■ t hose e a r n i ng not ove r P250,000 will pay a fixed tax rate of P500; ■ those earning over P250,000, but not over P400,000, would pay a fixed tax of P500 with an additional 20 percent of the excess over P250,000; ■ those earning over P400,000, but not over P800,000, would pay a fixed tax of P30,500, with an additional 25 percent of the excess over P400,000; ■ those earning over P800,000, but not over P2 million, would pay an excess tax of P130,500, with an additional 30 percent of the excess over P800,000; ■ those earning over P2 million, but not over P5 million, would pay a fixed tax of P490,500, with an additional 32 percent of the excess

been released, so far, under the Duterte administration.

Iglesia Filipina Independiente priest Dionito Cabillas said there are still 505 political detainees “ languishing” in various jails, including the National Bilibid Prisons (NBP).

“They are living among ordinary criminals, while their arrest and incarceration is political in nature,” said Cabillas, who is also Selda’s national coordinator.

An activist during the martiallaw years, Cabillas was arrested in February 1993 and was detained for nine days. Since then, he has been working to help political detainees.

“In my experience, there are 63 political detainees in the NBP,” Cabillas told the BusinessMirror in Tagalog.

THERE are 52 political detainees in the maximum-security compound of the NBP. They belong to one cell and are

SELDA’S members visit political detainees often to monitor their conditions in jail and followup cases, including those already convicted and were transferred to the NBP. Ironically, political detainees in the maximum-security compound are considered “better off” than

those in other prison cells and are tagged as “common criminals.”

In the NBP’s medium-security compound, however, six political detainees are living with these “common criminals.”

“It is more difficult for them [political prisoners] because the cells are overcrowded and they eat whatever the NBP cooks for the inmates,” he said. “Another problem is a place to sleep.”

According to Cabillas, two inmates sleep in a double-deck cot made out of wood.

“Inmates also sleep even under the bed,” Cabillas said. “Naglalagay na lang sila ng karton para hindi malamigan [They just place disassembled cardboard to protect their backs from the cold cement].”

“We can’t even walk around to pee or go to the comfort room when we have to go,” he added.

Because a cell is overcrowded, inmates sleep on their side.

“They acquire skin diseases; some develop rashes because of sleeping

over P2 million; and ■ those earning over P5 million, would pay a fixed tax of P1,450,500, with an additional 35 percent of the excess over P5 million.

For 2019, the new tax brackets are: ■ t hose e a r n i ng not ove r P250,000, will pay a fixed tax rate of P500; ■ those earning over P250,000, but not over P400,000, would pay a fixed tax of P500, with an additional 15 percent of the excess over P250,000; ■ those earning over P400,000, but not over P800,000, would pay a fixed tax of P23,000, with an additional 20 percent of the excess over P400,000; ■ those earning over P800,000, but not over P2 million, would pay an excess tax of P103,000, with an additional 25 percent of the excess over P800,000; ■ those earning over P2 million, but not over P5 million, would pay a fixed tax of P403,000, with an additional 30 percent of the excess over P2 million; and ■ those earning over P5 million

would pay a fixed tax of P1,303,000, with an additional 35 percent of the excess over P5 million.

In the current setup, those earning P10,000 or less per month pay 5-percent income tax, while those with yearly earnings of P500,000 and above pay 32-percent income tax.

The draft proposal also provides that not later than five years after the effectivity of this act and every five years thereafter, the above taxable income levels and base tax in the above schedules shall be adjusted through rules and regulations issued by the secretary of finance after considering, among others, the effect on inflation.

The measure also said a final tax of 32 percent effective January 1, 2018, (from 34 percent in 1998); 30 percent effective January 1, 2019, (from 33 percent in 1999 and 32 percent in 2000) is imposed on the grossed-up monetary value of fringe benefits furnished or granted to the employee (except rank and file employees as defined herein) by the employer, whether an individual or a corporation (unless

the fringe benefit is required by the nature of, or necessary to the trade, business or profession of the employer, or when the fringe benefit is for the convenience or advantage of the employer).

The bill also said the grossedup monetary value of the fringe benefit shall be determined by dividing the actual monetary value of the fringe benefit by 68 percent effective January 1, 2018, (from 66 percent in 1998); 70 percent effective January 1, 2019, (from 67 percent in 1999 and 68 percent in 2000) and thereafter.

“Fringe benefits” pertain to any good, service or other benefit furnished or granted in cash or in kind by an employer to an individual employee (except rank and file employees as defined herein) such as, but not limited to, housing; expense account; vehicle of any kind; household personnel, such as maid, driver and others; interest on loan at less than market rate to the extent of the difference between the market rate and actual rate granted; membership fees,

‘Galunggong’

allowed to cook their own food.

Cabillas said each prisoner try to make do with the P50 allowance per day.

The money, he said, allows them to eat twice a day. “Most of our meals are vegetables because these are less expensive than fish. Some of the vegetables the prisoners get from small garden plots within the prison grounds.”

Cabillas said they eat canned sardines more than galunggong (mackerel scad) because the former can feed more. “’Pag may galunggong, parang mayroong may birthday [If mackerel scad is served, many ask whose birthday it is that day].”

‘Better off’

in one position for too long.”

Cabillas also noted the aggravating factor is the lack of water and sanitation inside prison cells.

Water is rationed at the NBP’s Reception and Diagnostics Center, he said, adding that the supply of water is not enough for bathing.

“Tatlong tabo lang bawat isa,” Cabillas said. “Kaya minsan sabaysabay silang naliligo [Each inmate is given only three ladles of water for bathing. That’s why some of them take a bath simultaneously].”

Ordinary

POLITICAL prisoners in various provincial, city and municipal jails experience the same hardships, according to documents provided by Selda, which is also the Filipino word for “detention cell.”

Provincial jails are managed by the provincial government, while city and municipal jails are run by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP).

In the Manila City Jail, there dues and other expenses borne by the employer for the employee in social and athletic clubs or other similar organizations; expenses for foreign travel; holiday and vacation expenses; educational assistance to the employee or his or her dependents; and life or health insurance and other nonlife-insurance premiums or similar amounts in excess of what the law allows.

The measure will amend Sections 24, 31, 32, 34, 35, 79, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 148 and Title VI of the RA 8424 of the National Internal Revenue Code, as amended.

Offsetting measures

Meanwhile, the draft bill will impose higher taxes on petroleum products, sugar products, alcohol and tobacco products and eliminate certain exemptions from valueadded tax to make up for the estimated P179 billion in foregone revenues from the planned tax cuts.

Under the bill, effective January 1, 2017, excise tax will be imposed on: ■ lubricating oils and greases, including, but not limited to, base stock for lube oils and greases, high vacuum distillates, aromatic extracts, and other similar preparations, and additives for lubricating oils and greases, whether such additives are petroleum based, per liter and kilogram, respectively, of volume capacity or weight, P10 (from P4.50); ■ processed gas, per liter of volume capacity, P6 (from P0.05); ■ waxes and petrolatum, per kilogram, P10 (from P3.50); ■ on denatured alcohol to be used for motive power, per liter of volume capacity, P6 (from P0.05): ■ naphtha, regular gasoline and other similar products of distillation, per liter of volume capacity, P10 (from P4.35).

■ leaded premium gasoline, per liter of volume capacity, P10 (from P5.35); ■ unleaded premium gasoline, per liter of volume capacity, P10 (from P4.35); ■ aviation turbo jet fuel, per liter of volume capacity, P10 (from P3.67); ■ kerosene, per liter of volume capacity, P6 (from P0.00); ■ diesel fuel oil, and on similar fuel oils having more or less the same generating power, per liter of volume capacity, P6 (from P0.00); ■ liquefied petroleum gas, per liter, P6 (from P0.00); ■ asphalts, per kilogram, P6 (from P0.56); and ■ bunker fuel oil, and on similar fuel oils having more or less the same generating power, per liter of volume capacity, P6 (from P0.00).

are five political detainees. Fortunately, they are able to rent a room called kubol. The Manila City Jail charges detainees for “board and lodging.”

Detainees can rent a kubol, according to Cabillas.

“But these facilities are only for those who can afford the monthly rent,” he told the BusinessMirror.

“Some who cannot afford a kubol sleep on the floor.”

According to Cabillas, these political prisoners eat the same food as that of other NBP inmates.

In the Taguig City Jail’s female dormitory, there are 12 political detainees. There are more than 40 female detainees in one cell, a number already considered overcrowded

by Selda.

In the Special Intensive Care Area in Camp Bicutan, Taguig, there are 22 political detainees, experiencing the same fate as that of political prisoners in other penal compounds, Cabillas said.

To be continued

The draft bill also said the tax rates shall be increased by 10 percent every year thereafter, effective January 1, 2018, through revenue regulations issued by the secretary of finance.

The draft bill also said there shall be levied, assessed and collected on sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs) per liter of volume capacity, an excise tax of P10 upon removal from the manufacturer’s plant or upon importation.

It also said the rate of tax imposed will be increased by 10 percent every year thereafter effective on January 1, 2018, through revenue regulations issued by the secretary of finance.

Under t he bi l l, t he SSBs, which shall mean nonalcoholic beverages that contain caloric sweetener, include: ■ soft drinks: nonalcoholic, flavored carbonated or noncarbonated beverages; ■ Soda, pop, soda pop: same as soft drinks; ■ fruit drinks, punches or ades: sweetened beverages of diluted fruit juice; ■ sports drinks: beverages designed to help athletes rehydrate, as well as replenish electrolytes, sugar and other nutrients; ■ sweetened tea and coffee drinks: teas and coffees to which caloric and noncaloric sweeteners have been added; ■ energy drinks: most energy drinks are carbonated drinks that contain large amounts of caffeine, sugar and other ingredients, such as vitamins, amino acids and herbal stimulants; ■ all nonalcoholic beverages that are ready-to-drink and in powder from with natural or artificial sugar; and ■ all nonalcoholic beverages with added artificial sugar sweeteners “Sugar sweetened beverages, which are blended and sold at establishment, such as coffee shops, cafeteria and restaurants, shall be taxed on the syrup or sugar-added used and shall subject to the rate of P10-per-liter excise tax,” the draft bill said.

Products excluded from the excise tax on SSBs are 100-percent natural fruit juices; vegetable juices; yoghurt and fruit flavored yoghurt beverages with pure fruit and vegetable juice or concentrate; meal replacement beverages (medical food), as well as weight loss products; all milk products, infant formula and milk alternatives, such as soy milk or almond milk, including flavored milk, such as chocolate milk; and all other 100-percent natural fruit or vegetable drink with coconut sap, molasses or honey.

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News

BusinessMirror

Monday, September 26, 2016 A3

Bm dominates 25th Ejap journalism awards, bags business news source title continued from A1

Mary Grace Padin, who now writes for another newspaper, was named Reporter of the Year for the Agribusiness and Mining beat. Lenie Lectura was awarded Energy Beat Reporter of the Year, while Cai U. Ordinario won the award as Reporter of the Year for the Macroeconomy beat. Lorenz S. Marasigan was recognized for a business feature story.

The BusinessMirror’s Bianca Cuaresma, assigned to cover the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, was recognized as the best dressed reporter during the ceremonies held at the Ayala Museum.

Publisher T. Anthony C. Cabangon, who was out of the country during the awarding ceremonies, sent the paper a congratulatory message via e-mail.

The Ayala Group is the major sponsor of this year’s awards.

The reporters were judged based on the stories published in the previous year. Content, which covers accuracy, fairness, balanced presentation and depth, was assigned a 60-percent weight.

The remaining 40 percent is style, which covers clarity, ability to communicate the message, grammar, logical presentation of issues, coherence and fluidity of ideas.

Entries, composed of a set of stories, were first screened by senior business reporters who now work for international news organizations.

The screened entries were then transmitted to the board of judges, composed of respected individuals from their field.

Milwida Guevara of Synergia was again this year’s chairman of the panel of judges.

Punongbayan and Araullo was the accounting firm hired to tabulate the scores given by the judges.

Miguel Camus, a former BusinessMirror reporter who is now with the Philippine Daily Inquirer, was named Best Telecommunications Reporter. Another PDI reporter, Ben de Vera, was adjudged as Finance Reporter of the Year. BusinessWorld bagged the Reporter of the Year award for two Business beats, while Malaya Business Insight’s Irma Isip was named Reporter of the Year for the Trade and Industry beat.

BMReports BusinessMirror

A4 Monday, September 26, 2016

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DTI seeks Duterte’s endorsement for ₧7.2-B rolling steel-mill project T

By Catherine N. Pillas

@c_pillas29

he Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is appealing to President Duterte to give the green light to the P7.2-billion rolling steel mill project in Bulacan to revive the country’s flagging iron and steel industry.

8.76MMT The annual steel consumption of the Philippines

Asia’s rolling steel mill as a strategic project which could help build up the capacity of the local steel and iron industry. It is envisioned to be the country’s largest rebar-manufacturing facility, with a production capacity of 1.2 million tons.

The iron and steel industry today has diminished both in output and employment, due to the availability of cheaper steel imports from China, coupled with tariff elimination under the World Trade Organization.

As the shipbuilding and construction industries are currently on the uptrend, the DTI said the time is ripe for the local iron and steel industry to revive production and meet the expected increase in demand for steel.

The local industr y imports around 4.84 million metric tons (MMT) of steel, or half of the Philippines’s steel consumption of 8.76

AP PHOTO

T he DTI is ta k ing up the cudgels for embattled steel-production firm, Del Pilar Steel Inc. (DPSI), the proponent of the P7.2-billion steel-mill project in Bulacan that has yet to take off despite securing regulatory approval from the previous administration.

In a letter addressed to President Duterte, the DTI said Bulacanbased civil-society groups’ motion to block the steel plant’s establishment is delaying its operations.

The DTI said Steel Asia, which owns DPSI, has already secured an environmental compliance certificate from the Department and Environment and Natural Resources and the go signal from Plaridel’s legislative council.

However, the Kalikasang Dalisay Para sa Mamamayan ng Plaridel (Kadamay) said the issue of classification of the land to be used has yet to be settled.

Kadamay also said the plant’s area is irrigated agricultural land.

The DTI’s letter also indicated that the Department of Agrarian Reform has yet to convert the land into industrial use.

The department considers Steel

MMT. Steel Asia, the country’s largest steel producer, accounts for 2.1 million tons of Philippine industries’ annual requirements.

“We highly recommend the endorsement of the President of Steel Asia’s project to smoothen its entry

in any viable site in the Philippines.

The President’s endorsement can insulate the project from social opposition that may arise in the future that could delay its implementation,” the letter read.

During the campaign period,

President Duterte pledged to revive the country’s iron and steel industry, as it is considered the backbone of the country’s industrialization. In June Mr. Duterte’s economic team led a consultative workshop with the country’s major business groups.

Among the recommendations of the business groups is the practice of “responsible mining,” with the option to gradually phase out mineral-ore exporting. This, they say, would spur value-adding in the local iron and steel industry.

Govt to craft P100-M master plan on water

BY Cai U. Ordinario @cuo_bm

Bloomberg Photo

F PHL to host US war games after Duterte softens stance

T

HE Philippines and the US have scheduled military drills next month in the Philippines, the US embassy in Manila said, days after President Duterte acknowledged that his country did need American troops in the South China Sea. About 1,400 US servicemen based in Okinawa, Japan, and 500 Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) personnel will conduct an amphibious-landing exercise and live-fire training in multiple locations on the main island of Luzon and in Palawan, according to a statement on the embassy’s web site on Saturday. The drills, aimed at making troops better prepared to operate together during a natural disaster or armed conflict, are set for October 4 to October 12.

Duterte has sent conflicting messages about Philippine foreign policy and the nature of his nation’s tie-ups with overseas partners since he was sworn in late June, sowing confusion at a time of rising concern about

China’s claims to most of the South China Sea. The former mayor last week acknowledged that his country needed American troops after earlier calling for the end of joint patrols in the strategic waterway. The US alliance with the Philippines has for decades been a bedrock of American influence in the region.

“Exchanging expertise and cultivating our long-standing security alliance provides a cornerstone for security and stability in the region, and has for decades,” Brig.

Gen.John Jansen, commanding general, 3rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, was quoted in the statement as saying.

Duterte has proved to be unpredictable, as well as blunt and provocative, in his opening weeks in office, and has often made conflicting statements. These have included remarks on whether the Philippines intends to negotiate with China over territory in the South China Sea, a region in which Manila also has claims. Bloomberg News

OR the country to meet its Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) commitments, the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) will craft a Water Supply, Sanitation and Sewerage Master Plan.

Neda documents obtained by BusinessMirror showed the plan will cost P100 million and will be undertaken next year for a period of 12 months.

The master plan will be spearheaded by the Neda and the Infrastructure Committee (Infracom) subcommittee on water resources.

“It aims to develop an updated master plan for the water-supply

sectors that will set the direction in helping the country meet the sector challenges and attain the targets as identified under the existing 2009 Philippine Water Supply Sector Roadmap [PWSSR],” Neda documents stated.

“The updating needs to take into account what has been accomplished thus far, and what needs to be accomplished moving forward, taking into consideration recent policy developments in the sector,” it added.

The Neda said the master plan will review and asses the implementation of priority programs and activities under the PWSSR, including the identification of gaps and challenges faced by concerned agencies.

The master plan, the Neda said, will pick up from the targets identified under the PWSSR and update these targets, if necessary.

The PWSSR was developed to serve as road maps to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets by 2015 and longterm targets of universal access by 2025 for water supply and 2028 for sanitation. The new master plan will also incorporate the targets set under SDG Goal 6, which includes, among others, universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water, as well as access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all by 2030.

The SDGs are composed of around 169 targets and over 300 global indicators. The goals were

adopted in September last year.

These Global Goals aim to end poverty and hunger, promote universal health, education for all and lifelong learning, achieve gender equality, sustainable water management, ensure sustainable energy for all, decent work for all, resilient infrastructure, and reduce income inequality between and among countries.

The goals also include create sustainable cities, ensure sustainable consumption and production, take action against climate change, conserve and sustainably use oceans and marine resources, reduce biodiversity loss, achieve peaceful and inclusive societies, and revitalize global partnership for development.

Goldman Sachs said to plan 25% cut to Asia investment-bank jobs

G

oldman Sachs Group Inc. plans to cut about a quarter of its investment-banking jobs in Asia, excluding Japan, because of a slump in deal-making in the region, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The New York-based bank plans to make the cutback of about 75 jobs in the region later this year, the person said, asking not to be identified because the matter is confidential. The job reduction comes as the bank faces its worst Asia ranking in equity issuance since 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg data.

A Goldman Sachs spokesman said he was unable to comment.

Asia ex-Japan equity offerings have declined 29 percent this year, and Goldman’s ranking plummeted to 11th from second in 2015, its worst showing in about eight years, the data show.

The company also has come under scrutiny by authorities for its role in underwriting $6 billion of bond sales for 1MDB, the Malaysian government fund at the center of several international investigations into suspected corruption and money laundering.

Chinese securities firms are mounting a challenge to western banks, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in Asia, with mainland companies occupying seven of the top 10 positions in advising on

Hong Kong initial public offerings this year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Postal Savings Bank of China Co. raised $7.4 billion in a Hong Kong initial public offering this week, the world’s biggest firsttime share sale this year.

Global investment banks have reduced headcount to trim costs after reporting declines in profit this year. UBS AG trimmed senior management ranks in the region, removing an Asia investment banking cohead position in July. The bank’s pretax profit at its investment bank slumped 48 percent in the second quarter, which the bank partly blamed on a slowdown in its Asia-Pacific equities business. Nomura Hold-

ings Inc. and Macquarie Group Ltd. also cut jobs this year.

Goldman Sachs last month told US regulators it plans to eliminate 15 positions in New York before the end of this year to reflect slower trading and investmentbanking activity. Goldman Sachs has cut jobs at least four times this year, with prior announcements informing New York officials of 408 dismissals. The bank has also extended cutbacks in its fixed-income division to roughly 10 percent of staff, double what it normally culls every year.

Reuters earlier reported Goldman is cutting almost 30 percent of the investment-banking jobs in ex-Japan Asia. Bloomberg News

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AseanMonday BusinessMirror

Thai Airways enters new phase after 2 years of corporate rehab

A

new route plan for Thai International Airways (Thai) will take about six months from October, President Charamporn Jotikasthira says.

After nearly two years of business rehabilitation, the state enterprise has started to return to the black, he said. Now the carrier is entering a phase of adjusting entire routes and flights within each route to make them better suited to the flag carrier’s locations and fleet.

“Since we returned to the black, we can now resume some routes that we had temporarily terminated when cost cutting was our priority, and also open new routes that will support our network,” Charamporn said.

Thai’s latest route, BangkokTehran, launches on October 1

with four flights a week.

The route is expected to have as high as an 80-percent cabin-load factor. The target group is tourists traveling to Thailand, as well as business travelers and tourists from Australia and Malaysia who travel to Iran with a stopover in Bangkok.

The Bangkok-Moscow route, which Thai plans to resume on December 15, will offer four flights a week. THAI is seeking partners on different routes to improve the viability of services such as Bangkok-Moscow.

The airline has reached out

to travel agents in 20 cities in Russia, especially in high-potential Siberia.

“From our study, this route has high demand both inbound and outbound,” Charamporn said. “The study also found that demand from travelers in neighboring countries that want to fly to Moscow through Bangkok is relatively high.”

He said the company’s new flight schedule of new and resurrected routes would improve efficiency of flying-hour usage for each plane, from 11 hours a day to 13, to reach an optimum level on a par with industry norms.

Once Thai has improved the efficiency of its plane utilization and routes for existing aircraft, including the new Airbus 350-900 XWB, the company can expand with further routes without needing to acquire new planes for a long while.

In the fourth quarter of this year, THAI plans to increase the

frequency of flights to Melbourne by using the A irbus 350 -900 XWB for the route. “This route allows us to use an aeroplane at its highest efficiency,” Charamporn said. “Because it takes about nine hours to fly from Bangkok to Melbourne, it means we can use one aircraft to fly out and back within one day.”

He said Thai would be able to increase its capacity by 5.7 percent during the winter flight schedule versus the schedule of the past summer.

In terms of cabin-load factor, the company is still confident that it can meet the target of 80 percent by the end of the year. The figure has risen gradually to around 75 percent in the current quarter.

A positive factor in support of meeting the target is the low price of crude oil, while a negative factor is that operating return per seat is relatively low, a trend affecting airlines worldwide. TNS

Editor: Max V. de Leon • Monday, September 26, 2016 A5

Wipro Consumer arm to buy China FMCG firm B

ENGALURU—Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting’s Singapore arm has agreed to buy Zhongshan Ma Er Daily Products Ltd., a Chinese fastmoving consumer-goods (FMCG) company, for an undisclosed amount in an all-cash transaction.

Wipro Consumer Care said this would be its second-biggest acquisition since it bought Unza Holdings Ltd., a Singapore consumer-goods firm, for $246 million in 2007.

This will be Wipro Consumer Care’s 10th acquisition since 2003; and with this, it expects its international businesses to account for 55 percent of its total global revenue.

The company said it has spent around $600 million in total on buyouts over the past 13 years.

“From our perspective, it’s a great acquisition, because it doubles our revenue in China. If we go back to 2007, when we acquired Unza, we were about RMB82 million in China alone; and with this, we will have a run-rate of close to about RMB1 billion [close to Rs1,000 crore],” said Vineet Agrawal, CEO of Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting.

The deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, has taken Wipro Consumer Care six years to consummate.

China will become the company’s third-largest market after India and Malaysia, once the deal is closed. Wipro expects to close the transaction by end-

October and anticipates that the newly acquired firm will start contributing to its revenue post that.

Zhongshan Ma Er is a family-run business based in South China’s Guangdong province, with 55 percent of its sales in shower products and 45 percent in liquid detergents.

“This gives us immediate access to resources that will help us fuel faster growth in our business, and enable us to unlock the true potential of our brands,” said Chen Rui Qiang, CEO and founder of Zhongshan Ma Er in a statement.

Talks between the two firms first happened in 2010, but the Chinese firm was not sure if it wanted to sell itself and Wipro wasn’t sure what the valuation ought to be. “When it didn’t work out, we decided to hold off serious negotiations for a while, but stayed in touch. It was picked up again about two years ago,” Agrawal said in an interview.

“China is one of the largest markets in FMCG but a tough one,” said Edelweiss Securities Ltd. Senior Vice President Abneesh Roy, adding that this was the first major buyout in the FMCG space of a Chinese company by an Indian company.

Indeed, China is not an easy market to crack, with challenges ranging from the basic and obvious language barrier to gaining a thorough understanding of local laws and markets. TNS

A6 Monday, September 26, 2016

Clinton, Trump to meet separately with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu

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HI TE PL A INS, New York—Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are expected to meet separately with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday ahead of their first presidential debate on Monday night.

Netanyahu was expected to meet in New York with the presidential nominees of the two major parties in what could set the tone for future relations between Israel and the next White House administration. The Israeli leader has sought to project neutrality this time after perceptions arose that he favored Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama in 2012.

The one-on-one discussions will follow what was likely Netanyahu’s final meeting with Obama last week, capping what has been a sometimes rocky relationship between the leaders of the two allies.

The Obama administration has opposed Israel’s push to expand settlements in the West Bank, while Netanyahu has been a leading critic of the United States nuclear agreement with Iran. More recently, Netanyahu has urged Obama to avoid pushing for a Palestinian state in his final months in office.

Clinton has supported a negotiated two-state solution in the region, vowed to enforce the Iran nuclear agreement and help defend Israel’s security. The former secretary of state suggested in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 earlier this month that the Islamic State group was “rooting for Donald Trump’s victory” and he had helped strengthen the hands of extremists by his provocative statements about Muslims.

Trump has been a fierce critic of the Iran nuclear agreement and promised during a speech to AIPAC earlier this year that he would deepen ties between the two countries if he was elected president, adding that the days of “treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on day one.”

But he also raised eyebrows when he questioned Israel’s commitment to a peace deal last year and said he didn’t want to show any bias in favor of one side or the other.

The meetings will also come after the US recently completed a 10-year, $38-billion military aid package for Israel. Clinton said in a statement that it would help “solidify and chart a course for the US-Israeli defense relationship in the 21st century as we face a range of common challenges.” AP

Swiss vote on granting new powers to intelligence services

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ENEVA — Swiss voters are casting ballots to decide whether to grant new powers to Switzerland’s intelligence services, like tracking Internet activity, snooping on e-mail boxes and tapping phones to better fight spies, criminal hackers and violent extremists.

A new intelligence law, plus pension reforms and environmental policy, are the three issues being considered in Sunday’s referendum.

Proponents say the law, passed a year ago, but not enacted, is needed to help Switzerland to catch up with other countries with stronger legal arsenals to counter cybercrime, snooping or extremist attacks. Opponents fear it will deplete civil liberties, do little to impede terrorism and chip away at Switzerland ’s long-vaunted neutrality.

Swiss law currently bars authorities from using anything more than publicly available information or tips from foreign officials when monitoring threats inside Switzerland. AP

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Germans fulfill refugee duty, now time for EU to act–Angela Merkel

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hancellor Angela Merkel made it clear on Saturday that Germans have done their duty to alleviate Europe’s refugee crisis and now the rest of the continent needs to do its share.

European Union (EU) countries have to accept refugees at a faster rate in order to alleviate the backlog of people stuck in the continent’s southeastern flank, Merkel said in Vienna after meeting with nine other heads of government. Their discussions focused on strengthening the EU’s border along the so-called Balkan route preferred by refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

1.5M The total number of applications for asylum the European Union received in the past 12 months

“In view of the many refugees who are already with us, other EU countries will have to jump in,” Merkel said at a news briefing. While it’s “encouraging” that other EU states have started to accept more refugees, she said the bloc’s “mechanism is too slow” for distributing people who’ve filed applications for asylum.

Refugees fleeing conflict and migrants seeking opportunity have strained Europe’s ability to cope in the past two years. The EU accepted 305,700 applications of asylum in the second quarter, pushing the total in the past 12 months to about 1.5 million. Germany took in more than 60 percent of the outsiders seeking help in the three months ended in June.

“You will never be able to close a border completely, but for Germany it’s been too much and I understand the concern,” Austrian Chancellor

As Hillary Clinton focuses on debate, Trump avows he’d champion women

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves to the crowd during a rally in Roanoke, Virdinia, on Saturday. Trump faces Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in the first of three debates on Monday. AP/Steve Helber

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OANOKE, Virginia—Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is arguing that he’ll do more to help women from the White House than Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. At the same time, he’s taunting her over the infidelities of her husband.

As Trump campaigned in the battleground state of Virginia, Clinton stayed close to home in New York, while preparing for Monday night’s opening debate. She was spotted at a Westchester hotel near her home in Chappaqua, but her campaign would not comment on whether she was holding practice sessions at the hotel.

Clinton and Trump were expected to meet separately on Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has sought to project neutrality in this year’s election.

There were perceptions that he favored Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama in 2012.

Trump told supporters at a rally on Saturday in Roanoke, Virginia, that Clinton has not delivered for women and children.

“My opponent likes to say that for decades she’s been fighting for women, that she’s been fighting for children. Why, then, are 70 million American women and children living in poverty or on the brink of poverty in our country?” Trump asked. “For

years she’s been doing this and she’s done nothing.”

The appeal came hours after Trump threatened on Twitter to invite a woman who’d had an affair with Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, to sit in the first row at their first debate. The Clinton campaign had invited Mark Cuban, a fellow billionaire and Trump rival, to the event.

“If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to sit in the front row, perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!”

Trump said.

Trump’s campaign officials did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday, and it remained unclear whether Flowers would actually attend.

Earlier Saturday, one of Clinton’s supporters, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, accused Trump and his fellow Republicans of “making hate OK.” She told Clinton campaign volunteers in Nashua, New Hampshire, that she never predicted a major presidential candidate would base a campaign on scapegoating Mexicans, women and Muslims.

Warren was particularly critical of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who denounced Trump in the primary campaign but announced on Friday that he strongly opposed Clinton and would vote for

his former rival.

“Is that really what your word is worth, Ted Cruz?” she asked.

In Texas Cruz described as “agonizing” his decision to announce that he would vote for Trump but denied that he had given in to pressure to support his rival for the Republican nomination. His announcement on Friday, from which the word “endorsement” was conspicuously absent, drew criticism because of his longstanding antipathy for the man he had called a “pathological liar.”

“Any path we took, if I supported Donald, if I didn’t support Donald, the criticism was going to be there,” Cruz told a packed Austin auditorium during a policy forum organized by The Texas Tribune. He had refused to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention and instead urged Republicans to vote according to their conscience.

Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, assured homeschooling advocates in North Carolina that Trump would be their champion if elected. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Clinton’s running mate, praised American Indian culture and highlighted his efforts to win federal recognition of the state’s tribes while visiting the Chickahominy Indian Tribe Fall Festival near his home in Richmond. AP

Christian Kern said at a separate news briefing. To alleviate pressure created by North African migrants, Kern wants to strike financial deals with Niger, Mali, Egypt and Senegal along the lines of the agreement the EU has with Turkey.

“We have a successful model with Turkey and this is the model on which we want to build,” Kern said. Under its agreement, Turkey has helped staunch the flow of refugees in return for economic aid and talks to extend visa privileges.

The influx of foreigners has triggered a backlash that risks tearing apart Europe’s political order and leaving the continent divided. The UK already voted to leave the 28-nation bloc partly because of concerns over immigration. Nationalist politicians promising to crack down on immigrants have won support in

Austria and Germany. A cleft has split eastern EU members opposed to accepting any refugees and western nations in favor of following legal conventions.

Leaders at the Vienna talks, which included Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, also weighed ideas that would bring more resources to periphery countries unable to act. Merkel suggested EU personnel could be dispatched to Greece to help manage the refugee buildup. Kern said legislation may be drafted to let military forces assist in some cases.

“We all understood that we need to control our borders and that it’s we who decide who comes to Europe and not the smugglers,” Kern said. “This may mean a backlog and therefore Greece needs our support.” Bloomberg News

Syria believes it’s on way to victory

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NITED NATIONS—Syria’s top diplomat told the world’s nations on Saturday that his country’s belief in military victory is greater now because the army “is making great strides in its war against terrorism” with support from Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah fighters.

Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said Syria is more determined than ever to eliminate “terrorism” from the country. The Syrian government refers to all those fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad as “terrorists,” including Western-backed opposition groups.

Al-Moallem accused the “moderate armed opposition” of committing crimes and massacres against Syrians “that are no less barbaric” than those of the Islamic State extremist group and al-Qaeda. The Syrian government, in turn, has been accused by the US and other Western nations of the indiscriminate killing of civilians, dropping bombs filled with chlorine gas as a chemical weapon, and torturing and killing opponents.

The Syrian official addressed the UN General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting after frantic but unsuccessful efforts by the US and Russian foreign ministers to revive a cease-fire that came into effect on September 12 but collapsed after a week following attacks by both sides.

The truce was aimed at enabling the delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid and paving the way for a resumption of talks between the government and opposition.

Syria was stepping up its military campaign even as talks were taking place between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the UN meeting on reviving the cease-fire.

As of Saturday, rebel-held parts of the city of Aleppo had come under a blistering wave of airstrikes that residents said was without precedent in the 5 1/2-year conflict which has killed over 300,000 people and driven half the country’s population from their homes. The airstrikes killed dozens, toppled buildings and sent wounded people flooding into poorly equipped clinics.

Aid was never delivered to Aleppo, and on Saturday government forces captured an area on the edge of the city, tightening their siege around the rebel-held east.

Global reaction was swift and condemned the new Syrian offensive in harsh terms.

UN Secretary-General Ban Kimoon “is appalled by the chilling military escalation” in Aleppo and underlines that the use of indiscriminate weapons including incendiary devices and bunker buster bombs in densely populated areas “may amount to war crimes,” his spokesman said, adding that Ban considers

this “a dark day for the global commitment to protect civilians.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry, called the bombing of Aleppo “beyond the pale,” accusing the Syrian government of “laying siege in medieval terms to an entire community.” Speaking at Tufts University in Boston, he demanded that Russia help bring peace to Syria instead of “an unacceptable precedent...for the entire world.”

Al-Moallem said the Syrian government remains committed to political negotiations in Geneva under UN auspices but he stressed that any solution must follow two parallel tracks: intensified counter-terrorism efforts and an intra-Syrian dialogue that allows Syrians to determine their future “without foreign interference.” He said a political solution should begin “by establishing a government of national unity comprising representatives from the government and the opposition, in all its factions, and tasked with creating a constitution drafting committee.”

Once a new constitution is approved by Syrians through a referendum, he said, parliamentary elections should follow leading to formation of a new government.

That proposal is contrary to the roadmap for a Syrian political transition adopted by key nations in Geneva in June 2012 including the five permanent UN Security Council members—the US, Russia, China, Britain and France—that has been the basis of subsequent Geneva talks.

It starts with the establishment of a transitional governing body, vested with full executive powers, and ends with elections, and requires Assad to relinquish power at some unspecified point. Al-Moallem made no mention of Assad stepping down as president and envisioned a military victory— something Russia, the US and the UN say is impossible.

“Our belief in victory is even greater now that the Syrian Arab Army is making great strides in its war against terrorism, with the support of the true friends of the Syrian people, notably the Russian Federation, Iran and the Lebanese national resistance,” al-Moallem said. He was referring to Lebanoon’s Shiite Hezbollah militia. Syria’s uprising began in March 2011 with mostly peaceful protests against the Assad family’s four-decade rule, but escalated into a civil war following a brutal government crackdown and the rise of an armed insurgency.

Al-Moallem accused Qatar and Saudi Arabia of spreading “terrorism” in Syria by sending in “mercenaries equipped with the most sophisticated weapons.” He also accused Turkey of opening its border “to let in tens of thousands of terrorists from all over the world,” and providing them with military and logistical support. AP

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Wells Fargo sued over firings for missed account quotas

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ells Fargo & Co. managers were accused of fueling the creation of bogus accounts in what may be the first lawsuit by fired or demoted employees since the bank was called out by regulators.

The lawsuit offers details of how low-level bankers were allegedly pushed to create at least 10 new accounts a day in a sales initiative that has blown up into a scandal and prompted US lawmakers to call for CEO John Stumpf’s resignation.

Bankers were “coached” to secretly open fee-generating accounts and often resorted to using false customer contact information, like NoName@WellsFargo.com, on accounts so they couldn’t be traced back, according to the complaint.

The bank, according to the Los Angeles suit, rewarded employees with promotions for using tactics, including “sandbagging”—opening fake accounts the day after a customer instructed the bank not to; “pinning”—assigning personal identification numbers without customer authorization; and “bundling”—lying to customers about limited availability of certain products in packages.

While Wells Fargo fired 5,300

employees that it blamed for opening accounts without client approval, the bankers who sued on Thursday said the dishonest practices were orchestrated by Stumpf. “Wells Fargo knew that their unreasonable quotas were driving these unethical behaviors that were used to fraudulently increase their stock price and benefit the CEO at the expense of the low-level employees,” the bankers alleged in state court. “Although this policy was known to top executives of defendants, plaintiffs, as bankers, were blamed for harm to clients and retaliated against.”

Authorities, including the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, fined Wells Fargo $185 million on September 8 for potentially opening about 2 million deposit and credit-card accounts without authorization. This week Senate Banking Committee members, including Democrat Elizabeth Warren, urged Stumpf to return compensation and resign.

‘Sandbagging,’ ‘pinning’

Wells Fargo hired a law firm to advise the board on potential pay clawbacks as the bank grapples with fallout from the scandal, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Robert Mundheim, a lawyer with Shearman & Sterling Llp. in New York, was retained to help the board determine whether to claw back compensation from Stumpf, COO Tim Sloan and Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of community banking, the newspaper said, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Oscar Suris, a spokesman at Wells Fargo, declined to comment on the claims made in suit or the reported hiring of Shearman & Sterling.

The bank has also been sued by customers and investors.

Employees were instructed by management to lie to customers by telling that each checking account automatically came with a savings, credit card or other type of account, according to the complaint.

Sales at each bank and for each employee were reported to district managers four times a day and discussed by them, according to the complaint. Employees who failed to meet daily sales goals were approached by management and often reprimanded. The plaintiffs said some workers were told by managers to “do whatever it takes” to meet the quotas.

Poland’s outsider Finance Minister at risk in Cabinet change

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inance Minister Pawel Szalamacha’s hold on his post didn’t appear that strong to begin with. So when his boss announced a cabinet reshuffle on Friday, investors focused on whether the lawyer tasked with safeguarding Poland’s budget is heading for an exit.

Adding to the anxiety, state news agency PAP reported late on Friday that Szalamacha may be ousted next week, citing sources at the ruling party it didn’t name. While government Spokesman Rafal Bochenek said there are no such plans after a similar report by Fakt newspaper earlier in the day, Premier Beata Szydlo declined to specify which ministers will be sent packing as she revamps her 10-month-old Cabinet amid allegations of cronyism.

Szalamacha is central to government efforts to keep the budget deficit below the European Union’s (EU) cap set at 3 percent of GDP, even as he has little say over the Law & Justice party’s budget-straining political priorities, such as ramping up social spending and reducing the retirement age. While his initiatives have helped limit value-added tax fraud, his track record is mixed as the European Commission last week forced him to suspend a new levy on retailers and revenue from a tax on banks is falling short of plan.

“The potential ouster of Szalamacha may fuel fears about Poland keeping budget targets next year, including staying on the right side of the 3 percent limit,” Piotr Matys, a London-based strategist at Rabobank, said on Friday. “Should trust in Poland’s fiscal policy deteriorate, it may mean higher yields as investors demand a bigger premium for taking on such risk.”

The zloty currency, which hit a one-month high on Thursday, weakened 0.4 percent to 4.2969 per euro at 6:54 p.m. on Friday. Warsaw’s main stock index dropped 0.6 percent, while the sovereign’s bond yields increased in reaction to the rising political risk.

Election flop

Henryk Kowalczyk, Szydlo’s economic adviser and minister at

Szalamacha

the prime minister’s chancellory, may replace Szalamacha as finance minister, PAP news agency reported.

Earlier on Friday, Szydlo praised Kowalczyk’s work, along with that of the labor minister.

Among contenders to replace Szalamacha is also the current acting CEO of state-owned BOS SA bank, Stanislaw Kluza, Super Express newspaper reported on Saturday, without saying where it got the information. Kluza was finance minister and the head of Poland’s financial watchdog during Law & Justice’s previous stint in power.

Szalamacha, 47, repeatedly declined to comment on his future at a news conference on Friday, called to announce new type of retail bonds.

He failed to be reelected to parliament in last year’s election, limiting his political clout within Law & Justice. He was also a lawyer at Clifford Chance Llp. in Warsaw, where he worked on state-asset sales before adopting views more favorable toward government involvement in the economy.

Ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the power behind Szydlo’s cabinet, has criticized the government for moving too slowly with budget overhauls. Szalamacha is also in an uncomfortable position vis-á-vis Deputy Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, a former banker that Kaczynski has said was in charge of the government’s economic policy.

Szalamacha’s tax on retailers

first triggered protests from shop owners fearing it would hurt their business, before getting struck down by the EU’s executive arm because of concern that it may breach the bloc’s state-aid rules. His other signature project, a tax on bank assets, has raised revenue of 2.1 billion zloty ($548 million) this year to August, less than half of the 5.5 billion zloty envisaged by the minister for the full year.

Nevertheless, the finance minister said this month that there’s a “positive trend” in tax revenues that will keep this year’s budget deficit below the planned 54.7 billion zloty.

Correcting ‘mistakes’

The pending changes in Szydlo’s cabinet come days after she fired Treasury Minister Dawid Jackiewicz, who personally oversaw a flood of appointments to companies controlled by the government and took the blame for allegations of cronyism there. Since winning October’s general election, Law & Justice has changed rules to make more appointments of government workers non-competitive and to ease qualification requirements, while picking former party members to run public television and the biggest oil company, PKN Orlen SA. “My impression is that the Law & Justice machinery isn’t working well,” Szydlo told public radio on Friday. “We did make some mistakes and we need to correct them.” Bloomberg News

Class action

The bankers who sued, Alexander Polonsky and Brian Zaghi, are seeking class-action status on behalf of other Wells employees in California who were fired or demoted during the past 10 years and are asking for at least $2.6 billion in damages. The suit includes claims of wrongful termination, retaliation, unlawful business practices and failure to pay wages.

Bank managers often handed employees blank account forms with an unknown signature at the bottom and the bankers were expected to fill out the forms, adding as many accounts as they needed to meet their quotas, Jonathan Delshad, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said in the complaint.

“It could have been a customer’s signature, it could have been their manager’s—they had no way of knowing,” Delshad said in an interview. “One of those customers was an exchange student making $300 a week who had four accounts, including two with negative balances.”

Delshad said his clients are no longer Wells Fargo employees and that one is now a real-estate agent.

A LinkedIn profile for Zaghi shows him working for Marcus & Millchap in commercial real estate in the Los Angeles area.

The case is Polonsky v. Wells Fargo Bank & Co., BC634475, California Superior Court, Los Angeles County (Los Angeles). Bloomberg News

Monday, September 26, 2016

A7

Leung pledges more land for cheaper Hong Kong housing

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ong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying pledged to provide more land to build apartments for low-income people in a bid to lower housing prices in the world’s least-affordable city.

Less than 25 percent of Hong Kong’s land has been developed, according to government figures. That is the reason housing is expensive and land supply is short, Leung said on Friday at a banquet hosted by the Bauhinia Foundation Research Centre think tank, according to a statement on the government’s web site.

“Every piece of our land could be used for building houses, as long as we, the Hong Kong people, want to do it,” Leung said. “We should have a clear sense on what matters most and what matters little, and it looks to me making sure Hong Kong people have a place to live is the absolute No. 1 priority.”

The government faces opposition to plans to rezone rural green-belt sites for housing, or build new apartments in already overcrowded areas.

Increased housing density in certain areas may cause traffic jams, “but it’s only a matter of inconvenience,” Leung said in the speech. Addressing subdivided apartments in Hong Kong is a matter of safety, which should override inconveniences, he said.

Second term

Leung’s speech came just a few days after the Hong Kong leader defended his decision to postpone two phases of a large public-housing project in the city’s northern outskirts.

Leung, who must decide soon whether to seek a second five-year term as chief executive, has spent much of his tenure struggling to subdue housing costs.

Hong Kong’s housing supply will reach 93,000 apartments in the next three to four years, the highest since 2004, Leung said. The extra supply will help reduce prices by HK$1 million ($129,000) per apartment, saving buyers HK$93 billion in total, he said. Bloomberg News

Six Petrus ’98 bottles may fetch $15,470 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong

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ix bottles of 1998 Petrus from the Pomerol region of Bordeaux may fetch as much as HK$120,000 ($15,470), or more than $2,500 a bottle, when they go on sale at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong next weekend, while three magnums of the same producer’s 2005 wine may sell for up to HK$150,000, according to an e-mailed statement from the auction house.

Twelve-bottle cases of Chateau Mouton Roth-

schild from 2005 are also for sale with an upper estimate of HK$55,000 per lot, while two 6-liter imperials from the same Mouton vintage carry an upper estimate of HK$40,000 each, according to the catalog. Twelve-bottle cases of Chateau Lafite Rothschild may sell for HK$75,000 each, while 12-bottle lots of Chateau Latour from the more recent 2009 and 2010 vintages are priced at up to HK$100,000 each. Bloomberg News

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The W

Business

Monday, September 26, 2016 • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

Suspect in Washington mall shooting ‘zombie-like’ when arrested–police

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URLINGTON, Washington— The 20-year-old suspect in the deadly Washington state mall shooting said nothing and appeared “zombie-like” when he was arrested by authorities nearly 24 hours into an intense manhunt, authorities said.

Island County Sheriff’s Lt. Mike Hawley said he spotted Arcan Cetin from a patrol car on Saturday evening in Oak Harbor, Washington, and immediately recognized him as the suspect who killed five people at the Cascade Mall in nearby Burlington.

Hawley said at a news conference they had received information that Cetin, of Oak Harbor, was in the area. Cetin, who immigrated to the US from Turkey, is a legal permanent resident who has been living in Oak Harbor, authorities said. He had been arrested once before in the county for assault, Hawley said.

“I literally hit my brakes, did a quick turn, I jumped out,” Hawley said. “We both jumped out with our guns, and he just froze.”

Cetin was unarmed and was carrying a satchel with a computer in it.

“He was kind of zombie-like,” Hawley said.

The suspect’s arrest capped a frantic search following the slayings of five people the day before.

The first 911 call came in just before 7 p.m. on a busy Friday at the Cascade Mall: A man with a rifle was shooting at people in the Macy’s department store.

By the time police arrived moments later, the carnage at the Macy’s makeup counter was complete. Four people were dead, and the shooter was gone, last seen walking toward Interstate 5. The fifth victim, a man, died in the early-morning hours on Saturday as police finished sweeping the 434,000-square-foot building.

“There are people waking up this morning, and their world has changed forever. The city of Burlington has probably changed forever, but I don’t think our way of life needs to change,” Burlington Mayor Steve Sexton said on Saturday at a news conference.

Authorities said it now appears the rifle was brought into the mall

from a suspect vehicle that was there, Mount Vernon police Lt. Chris Cammock said on Saturday night.

Cetin has not been charged, Cammock said. He will be booked into the Skagit County Jail and is expected to appear in Skagit County District Court on Monday.

The Seattle Times reports that Skagit County court records show three domestic-violence assault charges against Cetin. The victim was identified as Cetin’s stepfather.

The newspaper reports Cetin also was arrested for drunken driving.

Cetin was told by an Island County District Court judge last December 29 that he was not to possess a firearm, the newspaper reported.

However, the stepfather urged the judge not to impose a no-contact order, saying his stepson was “going through a hard time.”

As the small city absorbed the tragic news, critical questions remained, including the shooter’s motive.

Initially, the suspect was described as Hispanic, but Hawley said that was based on initial witness statements to the shooting at the mall.

Surveillance video captured the suspect entering the mall unarmed and then recorded him about 10 minutes later entering the Macy’s with a “hunting type” rifle in his hand, Cammock said.

Authorities did not say how the suspect may have obtained the weapon—whether he retrieved it from outside or picked it up in the mall— but they believe he acted alone. The weapon was recovered at the scene.

The identities of the victims— four women who ranged in age from a teenager to a senior citizen—were withheld pending autopsies and notification of family. The identity of the man who was fatally shot was also withheld and may not be released until Monday.

Wrongfully convicted man seeks exoneration and compensation

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ASHVILLE, Tennessee—A Tennessee man who spent 31 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit is getting a shot at exoneration and compensation, seven years after he was released.

The Tennessean reports the Tennessee Board of Parole will hear Lawrence McKinney’s case on Tuesday and decide whether to recommend that the governor issue a formal exoneration order.

McKinney had been falsely accused of rape and burglary in 1977 in Memphis.

Gov. Bill Haslam does not have to follow the board’s recommendation and does not need its approval to act. But a spokesman for the governor has said it is the administration’s policy to wait for the board’s recommendation before considering clemency.

State Rep. Mark Pody, a Republican who represents the former prisoner’s district in Lebanon, has been frustrated by how long the process of compensating McKinney for all his years in prison is taking.

McKinney, 60, was released in

2009 based on DNA evidence. The Board of Parole turned down his first request for exoneration in 2010, a decision his attorney at the time called shocking.

If McK inney is exonerated this time he would be eligible for compensation of up to $1 million.

Tennessee has paid compensation to wrongfully convicted men only twice before.

Clark McMillan in 2004 was given more than $800,000. He received $250,000 up-front with the remainder in an annuity that pays him about $3,400 a month, according to the Tennessee Board of Claims.

But McMillan said more than two decades in prison left him unable to build a career, and medical costs from multiple health issues without adequate insurance have swallowed much of that income.

Pody said he could see including health insurance and job training as part of McKinney’s compensation.

“I think we would want to give them more than money,” Pody said.

“I want to make sure the system is working properly.” AP

Lt. Mike Hawley with Island County Sheriff’s office discusses the capture of Arcan Cetin, 20, who was wanted in connection with Friday’s mass shooting at Cascade Mall in Burlington, Washington, on Friday. Officials, including Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (left) gathered in the Skagit County chambers in Mount Vernon, Washington, on Saturday. Dean Rutz / The Seattle Times via AP

Earlier Saturday as police scrambled to find the shooter, the small city about 60 miles (97 kilometers) waited and worried.

The community of 8,600 people is too far from Seattle to be a commuter town, but its population swells to 55,000 during the day because of a popular outlet mall, retail stores and other businesses.

Burlington is the only major retail center within 30 miles (48 km) in a region where agriculture is king.

Residents gathered on Saturday to comfort each other at a community gathering in a city park.

“It’s too scary. It’s too close to home,” said Maria Elena Vasquez, who attended the gathering with her husband and two young children.

Those who survived were still trying to process what happened as their community became the latest entry on a list of places known by the rest of world for mass shootings.

Joanne Burkholder, 19, of nearby Mount Vernon, was watching the movie “The Magnificent Seven” in the mall’s theater when security guards came in and told them to evacuate immediately. Dozens of panicked moviegoers gathered in the hallway, and Burkholder heard screaming as the officers escorted them to safety in a parking lot.

As she drove home later, she had to pull over because she was shaking so hard, she told The Associated Press.

“I’m just very thankful for my life this morning. I’ve never been so terrified in my life,” she said on Saturday, trying to hold back tears as she attended the community vigil.

People who believed they may have lost loved ones were being sequestered at a church three blocks from the mall, where counselors and a golden retriever therapy dog were

present. The Seattle Times reported that one of the victims in the deadly Washington state mall shooting is a 16-year-old girl.

Sarai Lara’s mother said she had survived cancer as a young girl and was a happy student.

Evangelina Lara told the newspaper through a translator that she was shopping on Friday night at the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Washington, with Sarai and her younger sister, but they split up.

Evangelina Lara says it was confirmed at 2 a.m. on Saturday that her daughter was among the five people killed.

Dozens of people attended a Saturday evening prayer service for the victims. The gathering was held at Central United Methodist Church in nearby Sedro-Woolley, Washington.

The Rev. Cody Natland lit five candles on a table in front of the church, one for each victim. AP

Colombia rebel leaders travel to Cartagena for peace signing

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ARI PLAINS, Colombia—Top Colombian rebel leaders have begun leaving the country’s remote plains for the Caribbean city of Cartagena, where they will sign a peace accord with the government next week.

A helicopter operated by the Inter-

national Committee of the Red Cross transported two groups of a total of about 40 commanders with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia out of the Yari Plains for the Monday ceremony.

The FARC’s maximum leader Timo-

leon Jimenez said peace would begin “on Monday, when President (Juan Manuel) Santos and I shake hands.”

The ceremony is expected to be attended by 15 presidents from around Latin America and leaders of international organizations. AP

Priests’ murders rattle Mexican city gripped by violence

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OZA RICA, Mexico—In this eastern Mexican oil town already weary of rising gangland violence and extortion, the abduction and murder of two priests this week sank many residents only deeper into despair.

The killings in Poza Rica, in the troubled Gulf state of Veracruz, also came at a moment of heightened tension between the Roman Catholic Church and Mexico’s government.

Church leaders are increasingly frustrated by authorities’ inability to protect their priests under President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration, and the church is openly opposing his proposal to legalize gay marriage by encouraging the faithful to join demonstrations around the country.

“This, in combination with the recent protests of gay marriage coordinated by the church, I think we’re seeing a new low point in the relationship between the church and the PRI,” said Andrew Chesnut, chairman of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, referring to Peña Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. “I think the overarching picture is that...the open-season on priests has just proliferated with the intensification of the drug war.”

When Alejo Nabor Jimenez and Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz were found bound and shot to death outside Poza Rica on Monday, it brought to 14 the number of priests slain in Mexico since Pena Nieto took office in late-2012. At least 30 have been killed since 2006. And on Thursday Church officials made a public plea for the life of yet another priest, who was reportedly kidnapped from his parish residence in the western state of Michoacan and has not been heard from since.

What exactly happened to Nabor and Suarez, and why, remains murky. Investigators have interviewed their driver who was abducted alongside them and escaped, but he has not spoken publicly.

Veracruz state prosecutor Luis Angel Bravo cited robbery as the apparent motive and said the priests had been drinking with their killers before they were abducted. That allegation infuriated the church, which saw it as the latest example of state authorities smearing victims in cursory-at-best investigations.

Bravo dismissed suggestions that a drug cartel may have been involved, although the Zetas and the Jalisco New Generation gangs are battling for control in Veracruz, including in Poza Rica.

Locals have gotten accustomed to hearing about grisly murders. The city of 195,000, has recorded 41 killings in the first eight months of this year—more than three times the toll for all 2015.

Only this time it wasn’t faceless strangers assumed to be cartel operatives, they were priests, respected community leaders. “In the newspaper there are two or three dead every day,” said a man who runs a business with a clear view of Our Lady of Fatima church, where the priests lived. “Usually you say, ‘if they killed them, it was for a reason.’”

Like many people interviewed by The Associated Press in Poza Rica, the man spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that speaking openly could make him a target for violence.

Ministering to an increasingly terrified flock, people say, Nabor threw open the doors of his church after taking up the post six years ago. AP

UK police arrest man in hacking of Pippa Middleton’s cell phone

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ONDON—London police say they have arrested a 35-yearold man suspected of hacking the iCloud account of Pippa Middleton, the younger sister of the Duchess of Cambridge, and stealing 3,000 photographs.

The Sun newspaper said on Saturday it was contacted by a purported hacker seeking to sell the images for a minimum of £50,000 ($65,000). It said the seller communicated using the pseudonym “Crafty Cockney” on an encrypted messaging service and sent sample photos showing Middleton being fitted for a wedding dress in advance of her planned 2017 nuptials.

The Sun said the hacker also

claimed to possess Middleton’s informal photos of sister Kate with her children, Princess Charlotte and Prince George, and naked images of her fiancé, James Matthews.

The Metropolitan Police say the man is being questioned in London. AP

In this June 19, 2015, file photo, Pippa Middleton (left), the sister of Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, watches the quarterfinal tennis match between Canada’s Milos Raonic and France’s Gilles Simon on the fifth day of the Queen’s Championships in London. London police said on September 24, they are investigating the reported hacking of the iCloud account of Pippa. AP/Tim Ireland, File

World

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Monday, September 26, 2016

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China begins operating world’s largest radio telescope in Guizhou province

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EIJING—The world’s largest radio telescope began searching for signals from stars and galaxies and, perhaps, extraterrestrial life on Sunday in a project demonstrating China’s rising ambitions in space and its pursuit of international scientific prestige.

Beijing has poured billions into such ambitious scientific projects, as well as its military-backed space program, including its second space station earlier this month.

Measuring 500 meters in diameter, the radio telescope is nestled within a stunning landscape of lush green karst formations in southern Guizhou province. It took five years and $180 million to complete and surpass that of the 300-meter Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, a dish used in research on stars that led to a Nobel Prize.

The official Xinhua News Agency said hundreds of astronomers and enthusiasts watched the launch of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. Researchers quoted by state media said FAST would search for gravitational waves, detect radio emissions from stars and galaxies and listen for

signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. “The ultimate goal of FAST is to discover the laws of the development of the universe,” Qian Lei, an associate researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told state broadcaster CCTV. “In theory, if there is civilization in outer space, the radio signal it sends will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar [spinning neutron star] is approaching us,” Qian said. Earlier this month, China launched the Tiangong 2, its second space station and the latest step in its military-backed program that intends to send a mission to Mars in the coming years. In August the country launched the first quantum satellite experts said would advance efforts to develop the ability to send communications that can’t be penetrated by hackers. AP

In this September 24, photo, released by Xinhua News Agency, an aerial view shows the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in the remote Pingtang county in southwest China’s Guizhou province. China has begun operating the world’s largest radio telescope to help search for extraterrestrial life. Liu Xu/Xinhua via AP

North Korean defectors sold as brides in China want kids back

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EOUL, South Korea—After fleeing North Korea to avoid extreme poverty and oppression, the young woman allowed a stranger to arrange a marriage for her with a rural Chinese farmer because she had nowhere to go. An even more painful decision came later.

She said severe abuse by her husband, including once being tied to a post, and the constant fear police would send her back to the North to face torture and prison convinced her that she needed to flee to South Korea. She decided she had to make the risky journey alone, leaving behind the young daughter she had with her Chinese husband.

“My heart has been torn apart,” the 35-year-old said of the daughter she left in the northeastern Chinese town of Longjing nearly 10 years ago, when the girl was 4. “I heard from my Chinese husband that my daughter cried herself to sleep and searched for me until she turned 8.”

She asked to be identified only by her surname, Kim, out of fear that publicity about her past would destroy her life in the South, where she has remarried and has two other children.

Kim has lost touch with her daughter and is afraid to return to China, but neither she nor other defectors in similar situations have given up.

Deep shame and guilt about not seeing their children and worry about social stigma in the South kept them silent for years, but some have begun pushing publicly for international help to get back their children. Four defectors plan to travel to the United States next month to seek help from US and United Nations officials.

It will not be easy.

Experts say Chinese authorities aren’t likely to accept the appeals because the women were illegal residents and their relationships were not legally recognized marriages.

Their efforts to reunite with their children could be viewed as individual family problems, rather than human-rights issues requiring international intervention.

“Is there any female defector who had registered their marital status in China?” said Yoon Yeo Sang, a cofounder of the Seoul-based nonprofit

Database Center for North Korean Human Rights. “For China, they were the ones who were supposed to be repatriated, and I wonder if China would accept their commonlaw marital status and take necessary legal steps.”

China’s foreign ministry did not reply to questions about whether it would help the women. The defectors say they deserve international attention because their plight was primarily caused by the North’s abysmal rights conditions and by China’s policy of repatriating North Korean defectors who are caught hiding in the country.

“There are South Korean laws, Chinese laws and North Korean laws, but none of them can help us,” said Kim Jungah, 40, a North Korean defector living in the South who was separated from her child in China.

Now an activist, she will lead three other women on a trip to Washington and New York from October 8 to 18.

The 35—year-old Kim from Longjing had initially planned to go to the United States as well, but said she canceled due to worries about the publicity.

The market for selling North Korean women into marriage in China heated up after the North suffered a devastating famine in the mid1990s that’s thought to have killed hundreds of thousands. China has significantly fewer women than men, and the imbalance is particularly acute in rural farming areas because young women often migrate to big cities seeking better economic opportunities.

Bride trafficking of North Korean women may have eased in recent years, but thousands of North Korean women sold to Chinese men are believed to still live in China, most illegally, according to activists specializing in North Korea affairs.

In the early years of bride trafficking, most North Korean women were lured by brokers who promised food and jobs in China; some were abducted. But later on, many have volunteered to be sold as brides because they lacked money to sneak across the border and believed living with Chinese men would decrease the danger of arrest and repatriation, ac-

In this August 25 photo, North Korean defector Park Kyung Hwa who works for a Seoul-based shortwave radio station targeting audience in North Korea, prays during a service at a church in Seoul, South Korea. Park, who fled the North in 2000 before being sold to a Chinese man, said she saw brokers grope other trafficked women many times. She said brokers kicked and beat her with wooden clubs for about 20 minutes when her first attempt to escape failed. AP Photo/ Jungho Choi

cording to Ahn Kyung-soo, a Seoulbased activist who has interviewed many defectors.

Kim—the woman who agreed to be identified only by surname—said she slipped into China on her own and managed to stay at an orchard for a few days in 2002. The orchard’s owner proposed that she marry one of his Chinese friends, 14 years her senior. Kim accepted because she had nowhere else to go. She later found that the orchard owner had essentially sold her to his friend as a way to clear a 6,000 yuan ($900) debt.

After arriving in China, many women are beaten or sexually abused before being sold to husbands.

Park Kyung Hwa, who escaped from her traffickers in 2000, said she saw brokers grope other trafficked women many times. She said brokers kicked and beat her with wooden clubs for about 20 minutes when her first attempt to escape failed.

“The brokers didn’t see [North Korean women] as human beings, but as products to sell,” said Park, 44. AP

Tourism&Entertainment A10

Monday, September 26, 2016

BusinessMirror

Editor: Carla Mortel-Baricaua

Niyogyugan Festival 2016: The festival that shook Quezon

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Story & photos by Gretchen Filart Dublin

ugust was a month when the world was shaken by tragedies and misfortunes: harrowing earthquakes that devastated Italy and Myanmar, and an all-time low for global gold-stocks relationships, to name some.

Musicians performed at the capitol during the festivities.

Elaborate trade booths were crafted by each municipality to showcase their best products.

The capitol of Tayabas was filled with a festive mood for two weeks.

The Niyogyugan Festival 2016 attracted visitors from all parts of Quezon and the Philippines.

In southern Luzon, a different kind of wave was shaking Quezon Province—one of merry beats, vibrant sights and blithe spirits.

The Niyogyugan Festival 2016, held from August 15 to 27 in Lucena, was what locals deemed the festival of all festivals. According to Provincial Administrator Romulo Edaño Jr., the annual festival takes root from Quezon’s ancestors and mirrors the province’s character—and that such should be leveraged in order “to promote and market local tourism.”

A portmanteau of niyog or coconut—Quezon’s chief agricultural product—and yugyog (to shake), this year’s festivities showcased not only the heritage and culture of Quezon but also the province’s main source of livelihood. With 2.1 million industry workers and an annual yield of 2 billion coconuts, Quezon remains the Philippines’s top coconut producer.

This year’s Niyogyugan Festi-

val proved nothing less. From a simple trade fair during its launch in 2011, the festival evolved into a full-blown two-week celebration peppered with musical performances, street-dance competitions, parades, trade booths and a prestigious beauty pageant, all celebrating the spirit of the coconut industry.

Droves of people—a vibrant mix of natives, local tourists and a few foreign ones—took to the streets to participate in the festivities. Colorful booths curated from coconut derivatives—husks, fibers, trunks and shells—lined the provincial capitol, each bearing the signature product of each of 37 participating municipalities. Winners brought home up to 5 million in development funds.

Even with the massive influx of tourists, people excitedly waited in line to sample delicacies and purchase coco-based products, such as virgin coconut oil, lam-

banog and coconut sap.

This year also marked the first Niyogyugan triathlon, which was participated by athletes from as far as Camarines Sur and Baler.

Trade booths notwithstanding, another must-see are the elaborate parade floats that housed Bb. Niyogyugan candidates during the lastday parade. As Niyogyugan tradition goes, the floats were painstakingly crafted from scratch using coconuts.

“Niyogyugan na!” the street dancers cheered as they sashayed across the capital alongside pageant candidates garbed in stunning coco-fiber gowns. People followed kilometer by kilometer and even with the searing heat, zeal and thrill filled Lucena’s streets.

The city possessed an energy so festive, it wasn’t too hard for an outsider like me to feel that, even in its infancy, Niyogyugan Festival holds much promise for the people of Quezon, especially for those who thrive in the coconut industry.

G Hotel Gurney in Penang unveils a new facelift

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Hotel Gurney has recently completed a 35-million-ringgit makeover, unveiling a complete modern and fresh new look with chic lobby, contemporary rooms, latest amenities, trendy food-and-beverage outlets and sophisticated meeting rooms. The 312 room designer hotel further stamps its mark as the market leader, being an icon along the busy Gurney drive enclave, located in the shopping paradise in between two renowned shopping malls— Gurney Plaza and Gurney Paragon—and right next to the famous Gurney drive hawker eateries.

“Our convenient location is the perfect point of departure for discovering Penang’s numerous tourist attractions, Unesco [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] World Heritage sites and beaches,” says Mr Michael Hanratty, general manager of G Hotel Gurney.

“We look forward to welcoming corporate and leisure guests to the hotel so they may experience the new level of comfort and sophistication. The hotel is the ideal choice for travelers who enjoy top-notch hospitality in a modern, stylish and contemporary settings.”

The famous award-winning glass lobby has been furnished with Italian designer furniture, such as Minotti and Porada, while rooms feature United Kingdom’s Camerich lifestyle furnishings, Serta mattresses, 300 thread count linens, Herman Miller designer work chairs, 55-inch smart HD LED TVs, eco-friendly Appelles toiletries, free nonalcoholic minibar, 150-Mbps free high-speed Wi-Fi in all rooms and throughout the hotel.

The hotel also added an additional five function rooms, named Conference I-V with natural daylight and Herman Miller designer work chairs, bringing a total of nine meeting rooms with two ballrooms, which are fully equipped with Bose sound systems, the largest LED screens in Penang, refined linens and unique mood lightings.

The ballrooms and the outdoor pool are the perfect venues for wedding couples to enhance their wedding events with new wedding packages and award-winning hand-painted

show plates by Lin Hairong, to name a few.

The hotel’s restaurants and bars have also been revamped and reintroduced to guest. Taste, offering the freshest ingredients all day long with the first-ever Lava Stone barbeque grill imported from Indonesia is a must try.

Tree Bar, the favorite among the happyhour goers, is the largest al-fresco bar in Penang, which sits perfectly under an 80-year-old ‘Albizia Saman” rain tree. Alternatively, the pool bar has been enhanced with new comfortable lounge chairs, large umbrellas, retractable roof and full blooming frangipani trees with green surroundings, perfect for a great suntan with a large infinity pool for a relaxing dip.

Executive lounge comfort gives the affluent travelers a place to relax and be pampered.

Available, too, are a state-of-the-art 24-hour gymnasium, G Cycle to pedal for sightseeing, and spa and hair salon for all guest enjoyment.

A cross usage and signing facilities are available to the sister hotel, G Hotel Kelawai, a buggy ride away, which opens up another world of luxury with a rooftop swimming pool, three more food-and-beverages outlets, a fully equipped business center and another 24-hour gymnasium.

Penang has earned a reputation from Lonely Planet as Top 10 cities for Best in Travel 2016, Best Street Food by Time Magazine, Top Ten Best Budget Travel Destinations 2016 by Forbes and 16 must-see destinations by Los Angeles Times. These coupled with a convenient location, 30 minutes’ drive to the Penang international airport and Penang Bridge makes G Hotel Gurney the ideal choice.

From simple gestures of a welcome ice cream to world-class hospitality, G Hotel Gurney denotes a five-star experience so chic, classy yet inviting.

With over 80 accolades, the hotel offers a calming retreat within an urban sprawl, be it for work or play. G Hotel Gurney prides itself on anticipating your every need with undivided attention. Only at the G Hotel, the place where modern and “experiences stylishly” lies within.

Shaking Quezon’s coconut and tourism industry

“It really is a celebration of life,” Provincial Tourism Officer Alberto Bay said. “Everywhere you look in Quezon, there are coconuts and coconuteers. The coconut also plays an important role in our history.

Villa Escudero is one of the Philippines’s first coconut plantations, and it has now turned into a premier tourist destination. In Sariaya we have the heritage houses, which are all products of the coconut industry.”

Bay said the festival, now on its fifth year, advances both the tourism and agricultural sectors by linking farmers and laborers to various local markets. By opening up opportunities for them to earn, more coconutbased products are manufactured, which helps grow the industry in a sustainable way.

“It developed market linkages and encouraged them to plant more coconuts. Winning municipalities

Each municipality had its own pageant candidate, as well as street dancers.

were able to use the cash prize for agricultural and tourism projects. More farmers and fishermen experience an improved quality of life,” he said.

From 2.9 million in total sales in 2011, this year’s Niyogyugan Festival garnered over 12 million in trade exhibit sales. Visitor arrivals also doubled from last year.

Gajo stressed the festival’s vital role in adding more value to coconutbased products. When there is high market demand for such products, there is also less desire for locals to cut down trees for coco lumber, a practice that adversely affects the coconut industry.

“By value adding, such as the processing of coconut into fiber or coco sugar, we are preventing soil erosion and ecological damage. We are also able to provide alternatives to simply selling raw coconuts or copra, because the prices of these are very volatile and offer little income for our local farmers,” he noted.

Department of Tourism Region 4A Director Rebecca VillanuevaLabit added that, on a wider scale, the goal is to develop the festival to be at par with other renowned Philippine festivals, such as Dinagyang, Panagbenga and Sinulog.

The Niyogyugan Festival, she said, is a perfect opportunity to attract both local and international tourists and to promote lesser-known destinations in Quezon, including Alabat, the Pollillo Group of Islands, Real, Infanta and General Nakar.

Such municipalities are often overlooked by tourists in favor of more popular and emerging destinations in Quezon, like Balesin Island, Cagbalete and Jomalig.

Quezon currently ranks third in Region 4A in terms of tourist arrivals. “These lesser-known destinations offer a lot in terms of beauty and natural attractions. Alabat, for example, is very interesting because of its rustic feel and the fact that one side of it is surrounded by Lamon Bay and the other by the Pacific Ocean.

On one side, the water is calmer and the sand, coarse. On the other hand, one experiences rougher seas and finer sand. Both sides can be viewed from a vantage point in Alabat,” Labit enthused.

Endeavors to promote the festival

Gearing up for bigger festivities next year, the local government works double time to build up its current position and seek more media exposure. Festival management seminars are also in place for locals to gain a deeper understanding of the festival and how it can benefit them.

To help ease traffic during the festivities, the local government coordinated with local authorities and provided accreditation to hospitality outfits so that more tourists can be accommodated.

During an interview, Edaño said, “Niyogyugan Festival mirrors the Filipino culture, and we hope that, with community effort, we can boost visitor arrivals and be on the same tourism level as Palawan.”

If this year’s festival is any indication, it is hardly far-fetched for that dream to come to life.

DOT joins ITE HCMC 2016 TOURISM Secretary Wanda Corazon T. Teo at the ITE HCMC 2016

Tourism Secretary Wanda Corazon T. Teo (third from right), Department of Tourism Vietnam Market Representative Miriam Melgar (second from left) with other members of the Philippine delegation

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ourism Secretary Wanda Corazon T. Teo led the Philippine participation in the 12th International Travel Expo Ho Chi Minh City (ITE HCMC 2016), Vietnam’s foremost tourism trade event, held at the Saigon Exhibition and Convention Centre (SECC) from September 8 to 10.

The 12th ITE HCMC coincided with a closed-door Ministerial meeting, which was attended by Teo and other top executives of national tourism organizations in Southeast Asia, as well as representatives from China.

“In addition to promoting our country as a short-haul destination, we learned new things about the policies discussed during the Ministerial meeting and our participation during the ITE HCMC and how it grew to be the largest travel event in the country’s Mekong region.

This event mainly promotes leisure tourism, luxury travel, MICE [meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions], medical and aesthetics

tourism, spa and wellness and even education tourism in Vietnam, as well as neighboring countries, like Cambodia and Lao PDR,” Teo reveals.

“Aside from being our friendly neighbors in the region, these three countries, which used to be known as Indo-China, are also our immediate competitors in travel and tourism.

Experiencing first-hand how they do tourism marketing and communications will help a lot in our own planning and implementation,” Teo adds.

Organized in 2005, the ITE HCMC has an average of 300 exhibiting travel companies, international and regional hosted buyers and the media.

In 2015 it recorded a total of 23,000 visitors, including consumers.

Supervised by the Market Development Group of the Department of Tourism (DOT), a 36-meter booth was set up and showcased Boracay, a top destination for the Vietnamese travel market, as well as other attractions.

Six Filipino tour operators engaged in business-to-business (B2B)

meetings with current and prospective Vietnamese travel trade partners. These Philippine-based tour companies were Ang’s Tour Inc., HRG Philippines-Marsman Drysdale Travel Inc., Jeron Travel, Pan-Pacific Travel Corp., Travel Experts Inc. and Uni-Orient. These B2B generated bookings to the Philippines out of the tour packages developed with the Vietnamese travel trade.

In spite online booking readily available, Vietnamese outbound travelers mainly rely on face-to-face contact with travel agents in their travel plans and decisions. Thus, participation in the biggest travel fair is one of the best approaches to gain business leads.

Outbound travel of Vietnamese to the Philippines is part of the DOTs opportunity markets producing less than 100,000 visitors per year. There was a steady increase of Vietnamese visitor arrivals from 2011 to 2015 with 17,781 to 31,579, respectively.

With preference for short-haul or neighboring destinations, Vietnam’s international outbound leisure travel trips numbered to 4.3 million in 2014 and forecast to grow to 6.4 million in 2020. CZL

Tourism&Entertainment BusinessMirror

news@businessmirror.com.ph

Monday, September 26, 2016 A11

Copenhagen—Where the happiest people in the world live

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By Olive Ramos

arrived in Copenhagen in the early spring and spent about 10 days there, enough to experience and appreciate its culture, people and way of life. In spite of the cold wind and frequent drizzles that time, I felt the warm welcome of the Danes by their friendly smiles and hospitality.

THE Tivoli Garden is a famous amusement park and pleasure garden where one can the enjoy the ride, food and entertainment.

Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark, which is one of the countries in Scandinavia and at the northern part of Europe. In 2016 Denmark has once again been ranked as the happiest nation in the world, this time by the United Nation’s World Happiness Report.

According to the UN report, what makes the Danes so happy is that they are very trusting of other people. Trust helps make people happy. The Danes also don’t judge other people’s lives.

They are allowed to choose the kind of life they want to live, thus adds to the overall satisfaction of people living there. Most i mpor t a nt, Da nes g ive more value to the quality of life, and prefer to devote more time with their family and friends while pursuing a meaningful career.

True enough, I saw many locals spend their weekend with their family. The City Square, which is right at the center of Copenhagen, is filled with young couples and their children, most of them listen in full delight to folk singers who enliven the square with songs of their own comp o s it ion . A not he r pl a c e most f requented by fa mi l ies

is the Tivoli Garden, a famous amusement park and pleasure garden where one can enjoy the ride, food and entertainment.

W h i le i n Copen h agen, we stayed most of the time in Nyhavn, a place with a picturesque landscape of ports and canal, surrounded by colorful buildings and sailing boats of varied styles.

From there we took the Canal Tour, which brought us to the magnificent Amalienborg Palace, the Little Mermaid statue and the stunning Copenhagen Opera House.

It is very easy to go around Copenhagen with its efficient public-transport system. The roads are also pedestrian and bicycle friendly. While walking within the city, one can enjoy the view of the scenic castles, the grandest of which is the Amalienborg, where the Royal Court resides.

Not far from the Royal Court is Christiansborg Palace, where the Danish Parliament, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Supreme Court are all housed. The Rosenborg Castle, also within the city proper, is a renaissance castle surrounded by beautiful gardens and was built as a summer house in 1606 by their famous King Christian IV.

THE Frederiksborg Castle was built as a royal residence for King Christian IV in the early 17th century and is the largest Renaissance residence in Scandinavia.

The University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden is particularly noted for its extensive complex of glasshouses dating from 1874.

THE Nyhavn is a place with picturesque landscape of ports and canal, surrounded by colorful buildings and sailing boats of varied styles.

The Fredensborg Palace is the summerhouse of the Queen bordering the idyllic Esrum Lake.

A must see is the National Museum of Denmark, which showcases the Danish prehistory, covering the Ice Age and Viking Era. It also exhibits the beautiful works of arts in the Middle Ages and the rare collection of Danish coins from Viking times to the present.

Walking distance from the National Museum is the University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden, particularly noted for its extensive complex of glasshouses dating from 1874. It has a total area of 10 hectares and its garden became part of the natural history of the National Museum.

The David Collection, located in a neoclassical building in central Copenhagen, showcases the private collections of lawyer C. L. David. The museum is known for its wide array of Islamic Art from the eighth to the 19th century, and is considered to be one of the largest collections in Northern Europe.

Aside from its castles and museums, Copenhagen is also an excellent place to shop and dine. Along Stroget, a high-profile shopping street, are Illums, a premium department store, Royal Copenhagen, known for its exclusive range of classic and modern hand-painted

porcelain and figurines, and Georg Jensen Silver. It is quite interesting to note that these stores are all purveyors to the Royal Court.

The Danes have penchant for good food. Their popular delicacies are pastries, waffles topped w ith ice cream and hotdogs.

Open-face herring sandwich is another favorite, as well as the freshly baked Danish breads, which are excellent for breakfast with a bit of butter and strawberry jam. Un Mercato is their famous and hip food market and eating-place with wide variety of selection both local and foreign.

In our last few days in Denmark, we traveled to the northern part of the country. We went to the Kronborg Castle made famous by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the magnificent Fredensborg Palace, which is the summerhouse of the Queen bordering the idyllic Esrum Lake, and the Louisiana Museum, which displays impressive modern art work in varied form. The almost one hundred works displayed in the museum include painting, photography, sculpture and installation of local and international artists. Its unique art collections astound-

ingly stimulate the mind and the five human senses. They are all truly amazing and awesome.

West of Copenhagen in the island of Zea land, Rosk ilde is another place we v isited. T he place is known for its gothic Cathedral, the Viking Ship Museum and its sprawling shopping area. T he Cathedral houses the 39 tombs of the Danish monarchs, while the Vik ing Ship has the per manent ex hibition of the five original Viking ships excavated nearby in 1962.

Within the neighboring municipality of Copenhagen is the Frederiksborg Castle. It was built as a royal residence for K ing Christian IV in the early 17th century and is the largest Renaissance residence in Scandinavia.

The municipality of Frederiksberg is considered to be an affluent, or “posh,” area and is characterized by its dainty and colorful structures and green spaces.

There are quite a number of famous people from Denmark. Hans Christian Andersen is a worldfamous children’s book author, whose huge statue stands tall in one corner of the City Square.

Karen Blixen is the author of her

Ten ways New Zealand will surprise you

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hen it comes to travel destinations, New Zealand is fast becoming a favorite, with the number of Filipinos visiting the country rising year on year. And who wouldn’t want to visit New Zealand with its picture-postcard beauty?

But New Zealand is so much more than the sum of its varied landscapes. Take the time to embrace the country’s incredible diversity— from music festivals in the vineyards to terrifying thrill rides and be surprised by this exciting island-nation.

1

Discover a world of contrasts

The main city of Auckland has more than 100 surf beaches right on its doorstep. No surf beach is too far from the main cities, so you have a choice of black or golden sands.

At Mount Ruapheu in the north you can ski or snowboard on an active volcano, while the Southern Alps can be accessed from Queenstown or Christchurch. When the New Year rolls around, celebrate it twice—the Maori New Year, Matariki, falls in late May or early June. matarikifestival.org.nz

2

Experience the great outdoors

Getting out into nature is a way of life in New Zealand—about a third of the country is made up of national parks. Hire or buy a bike and ride as part of the New Zealand Cycle Trail (nzcyletrail.com). You’ll find Department of Conservation (doc. govt.nz) huts in many of the national parks and along the country’s nine Great Walks

(greatwalks.co.nz). Parts of the country are really empty so you might have a beach all to yourself on the East Cape of the North Island or on the South Island’s West Coast.

a leap and discover a new identity 3Take

Commercial bungy jumping (bungy.co.nz) is a rite of passage for many visitors. You can throw yourself off spectacular structures throughout New Zealand, from Auckland landmarks to rail viaducts, bridges and ravines. Once you’ve taken that leap of faith, try a rope swing, a zipline, a bridge climb, Zorb (zorb.com) or Ogo (ogo.co.nz) down a hill in Rotorua in a giant inflatable ball.

4Explore diverse new worlds

Among the 4.5 million people who call New Zealand home you’ll find almost every culture you can think of. The indigenous Maori culture is unique to Aotearoa and you’ll have opportunities to learn the language, try doing the haka war dance, visit a marae and eat food traditionally cooked in a hangi (underground oven) or geothermal pool. You can experience Pacific culture at the annual two-day Pasifika Festival (aucklandnz.com/ pasifika) in Auckland each March, which features cultural performances, arts and crafts, and food and market stalls.

5Immerse yourself in music

New Zealand has a vibrant community and you’ll find plenty to do

from a full calendar of events. The best way to see in the New Year is at Rhythm & Vines (rhythmandvines.co.nz) on the east coast of the North Island. The three-day festival attracts international and local acts, with previous headliners including Major Lazer and Moby. For more of an urban vibe, Auckland hosts the Laneway Festival (lanewayfestival.com) at Silo Park. If world music or reggae is more your style, try Soundsplash (soundsplash.nz) in Raglan on the North Island’s west coast.

6

Make friends for life

Kiwis are incredibly warm, laid-back and hospitable people who will go out of their way to make sure you’re safe.

They’re keen for the world to realise what a great place New Zealand is and want you to go home raving about what a lovely time you’ve had.

7Eat and drink really well

New Zealand has its own style of innovative cuisine and café culture. Visit one of the many farmers’ or seafood markets to try foods you’ve never had before, such as feijoas (fruit) or paua (shellfish). There are world-renowned wineries ever y where you look, and if you love boutique beer Wellington (wellingtonnz.com) is the place to go— here you’ll find at least 15 craft-beer bars and eight breweries. It’s also home to some of the country’s best coffee.

yourself in glorious surroundings 8Reboot

Aotearoa has a host of health retreats and meditation centres. The North Island city of Rotorua (rotoruanz.com) sits in a geothermal field, and many facilities harness the natural therapeutic properties of its hot mud and natural hot springs. Around the area, it’s possible to stumble across hot springs where you can immerse yourself in peaceful surrounds in a stretch of stream for free.

9It’s easy to visit, and to stay

Kiwis like to keep things simple, so you’ll find things like opening a bank account, renting a flat or car and sorting out your driver’s license really easy. You won’t find it hard to get a job either—there’s loads of seasonal work, opportunities in hospitality and trades, and demand for workers in information technology and health. Once you’re working you can immerse yourself in culture and start enjoying the Kiwi lifestyle.

10

AJ Hackett bungy in New Zealand

Fill your social-media feeds

You’ll find photo-ops to make your Facebook and Instagram accounts the envy of your friends for years, whether it’s lying on the golden sands of the Coromandel; climbing one of the glaciers at the bottom of the South Island; sitting atop a volcanic cone in Auckland, covered in mud at Rotorua, or swimming in one of its lakes, rivers or oceans. New Zealand won’t stay your secret for long.

Hanging cooking

autobiography Out of Africa, which was later made into a movie that won several Academy Awards with Meryl Streep playing the role of Blixen. The Queen Margrethe II of Denmark is, of course, the ultimate icon of beauty, wisdom and grace, with her white hair and elegant stature becoming the inspiration in one of the characters in the movie Lord of the Rings.

We were very fortunate to witness the birthday of the Queen while in Copenhagen. Together with the large group of Danes walking towards the Amalienborg Palace Court, we saw how these people showed affection and respect to their Queen who elegantly came out to the palace balcony at exactly noontime in her aquamarine gown to wave and cheer the crown.

The people of Denmark are hospitable, friendly and helpful to guests and tourists. The Danes may look serious at times and their humor can be quite dry.

But deep inside, they are kindhearted, generous and charming.

It is such a pleasure to be with the happiest people in the world even for a short time. Truly, my trip to Denmark was one of my most memorable visits in Europe.

Science Monday

A12 Monday, September 26, 2016

www.businessmirror.com.ph • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

Male carps turned feminine due to Laguna Bay pollution

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he common carp, known as karpa in the local market, can possibly help in detecting the magnitude of waste in waterways.

In a st udy conducted by Dr. Michelle Grace V. Paraso of the Col lege of Veter i n a r y Med ic ine, Universit y of t he Ph i l ip pines, Los Baños, Lag una, car p was fou nd to have a potent i a l use as a bioma rker in detecting t he level of pol lut a nts in t he count r y ’s water resou rces.

The study evaluated car p as

f ish bioma rker in deter m ining the contamination of the Laguna de Bay in four sites: Santa Cruz and Paete in Laguna (East Bay); and Taguig City and Muntinlupa City (West Bay).

A biomarker is an organism with a particular substance that may serve as indicator of some natural phenomenon, like pollution, and

various biological pressures, like infection and disease.

Paraso found that the majority of the male carps in study site have shrunk testes compared with that of the normal male carp.

Shrunk testes of a male carp indicate that the fish has been feminized. Such feminization shows that the carp was exposed to certain type of pollutant known as estrogen, among others.

According to the study, changes in the reproductive conditions of carp are influenced by several factors, such as food availability, water quality and temperature.

Estrogenic contaminant or pollutant is estrogen produced

through unnatural means. The contaminants developed from chemical components obtained in an environment and they cause reproductive impairment in water organisms, such as fish.

Paraso is an expert from the Veterinary Medicine Division of the National Research Council of the Philippines of the Department of Science and Technology, which funded this study.

The study is relevant at this time when the government is pushing for a cleaner environment, especially in the coastal areas where many people live and obtain their livelihood. Geraldine

Bulaon-Ducusin/S&T Media Service

An Upper A scientist collects blood sample from a carp found in one of the study sites. Val Zabala, DOST-NRCP

Businesspeople keen on adopting DOST tech B usinesspeople from the Visayas are now looking into technologies from the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) for possible investment and business opportunities. “We asked the DOST to be our partner,” said Jude P. Abenoja, president of Ormoc City Chamber of Commerce and Industry (OrCham), as he told about the biggest business conference in the Visayas held recently at the Ormoc City Superdome in Leyte.

74 The estimated decline of catches of main fish species in the tropics by 2050

As a pre - event to the bustling 25thVisayas area business conference, the DOST held a Technology Transfer Day featuring 74 technologies available for adoption. This is the first DOST Technology Transfer Day held in regions. “We are selling technologies, not products,” Science Undersecretary Rowena Cristina L. Guevara clarified in her speech before the audience, who were wowed by new products.

The audience flocked to the sample area that featured crispy and nutritious vacuum-fried fruits and vegetables, among others. The products were produced using food-processing equipment from the DOST’s Food Innovation Centers. The DOST “sells” the technology behind said equipment to

entrepreneurs who will get a license to fabricate the machine.

Abenoja said he arranged with DOST-VIII Regional Director Edgar M. Esperancilla to hold the DOST Technology Transfer Day a day before the business conference, in order “to bring technologies and the DOST closer to the business sector as we share a common goal, which is to bring economic opportunities to the countryside.”

Around 300 out of the 500 businessconference delegates attended the Technology Transfer Day. Abenoja and the DOST-VIII identified technologies that can thrive in the region which were highlighted during the event. These were the carrageenan plant-growth promoter, semen ex tender for goat, nipa-sap sugar production, stabilized brown rice, complementary foods, DOST tablea, Food Innovation Center processing equipment, Starbooks, Eco-friendly septic system (Eco-Sep), and abaca fiber for packaging and currency base papers.

“The 11 technologies were handpicked as they were seen to work in our area,” Abenoja said. The organizers, composed of the OrCham, DOST-VIII, DOST-Technology Application and Promotion Institute and the Eastern Visayas State University, received a number of term sheets during the Technology Transfer Day, indicating inquiries for possible technology adoption.

“The partnership doesn’t end here,” Abenoja said. The OrCham previously partnered with the DOST regional office for the holding of the Visayas Cluster Regional Science and Technology Week in July. “ We would like to confirm our commitment that this partnership doesn’t end here. With the help of the DOST, the OrCham will help the pineapple and jackfruit sector. We already discussed this with Mayor Richard Gomez,” he added.

Framelia V. Anonas/S&T Media Service

Interested businesspeople check out new products made through the Department of Science and Technology-developed technologies at the Technology Transfer Day held recently at Ormoc City Superdome in Leyte. Framelia V. Anonas/S&T Media Service

Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama addresses the meeting about the Paris Agreement on climate change in the United Nations General Assembly at the UN Headquarters on September 21. AP /Richard Drew

Global climate accord racks up 60 signatories

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he historic global climate accord reached last December in Paris is moving rapidly toward enactment, with 60 countries—representing 48 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions—having formally approved it as of Wednesday.

To become law, the accord must be approved by at least 55 nations, and those nations must collectively be responsible for at least 55 percent of the climatealtering emissions.

The United States and China, the world’s largest emitters, formally approved the agreement this month. Many small nations approved the accord in spring, and 31 other countries—including Brazil, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates—formally submitted their approval at a special ceremony at the United Nations on Wednesday.

US Secretary of State John F. Kerry, speaking at the ceremony, said he was “confident we will bring this agreement into force this year,” probably no later than the next international climate conference in November in Marrakech, Morroco. Most international agreements take several

years to become law while they are approved by individual national governments. The blazing pace toward ratification of the climate accord reflects increasing concerns about climate change—2016 is on track to eclipse 2015 as the hottest year on record—but also political change.

Many world leaders and UN officials have expressed concer n about t he durabi l it y of t he ag reement if Republican presidentia l nominee Dona ld Trump is elected in November.

A lt hough P resident Ba rac k Obama has been a strong supporter of the accord and Hillar y Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, supports it, Trump has questioned climate science and said he would cancel the agreement if he is elected.

Patricia Espinosa, who leads the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told ClimateWire this week that “everybody’s aware of that possibility and just concerned about it.”

The concern has prompted a strong push to complete approval—or ratification—before the end of Obama’s second term, which ends in January. If the accord be-

came international law before a Trump administration were to take office, rules of the agreement would require at least four years to pass before the US could pursue withdrawing from it.

Even if a scenario like that unfolded, many experts believe d o m e s t i c a nd i nt e r n at io n a l pressure would prevent the US from withdrawing.

As Espinosa told ClimateWire, “ W h at wou ld h appen? W h at would be the reaction of the international community? W hat would be the reaction in the US, where today most US citizens believe climate change is real and something has to be done about it? It’s important that we’re aware that it would be a very, very complex situation.”

The chances of getting from the current 48 percent of emissions to the necessary 55 percent appeared promising on Wednesday.

At the UN ceremony, 14 more countries—including Austria, Australia, Cambodia, Canada, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan and South Korea—said they would approve the accord this year.

The European Commission also said it was prepared to approve

it this year, though the approval process in the European Union is complicated by different protocols among its 28 nations. Those countries create about 12 percent of global emissions.

The goal of the accord is to hold the increase in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That is a level scientists have said could avert the most damaging effects of climate change, though many scientists want the goal strengthened to 1.5 degrees. The accord includes provisions for that.

The commitments countries have outlined so far would meet neither of those goals, but the agreement has a rolling set of deadlines that are intended to spur countries to continually increase their goals.

“This momentum is remarkable,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday. “It can sometimes take years or even decades for a treaty to enter into force. It is just nine months since the Paris climate conference.

This is testament to the urgency of the crisis we all face.”

Los Angeles Times/TNS

Green Monday BusinessMirror

BusinessMirror

Editor: Lyn Resurreccion • www.businessmirror.com.ph

Monday, September 26, 2016 A13

Low fish catch in Samar Sea blamed on biodiversity loss Members of the Apex Club and Apex Women’s Club pose for a photo after the Sampalok Lake cleanup in San Pablo City, in celebration of the World Cleanup Day on September 17. The event, which was organized by i-CARE San Pablo, drew 300 volunteers from 30 civic, professional and non-governmental organizations, including schools.

World Cleanup Day: San Pablo citizens clean Sampalok Lake

S

ome 300 volunteers representing 30 civic, professional and nongovernmental organizations, including schools, joined the World Cleanup Day on September 17 by cleaning the shoreline of Sampalok Lake in San Pablo City.

The event was initiated by i-CARE, a Facebook-based informal organization whose objective is to promote cleanliness of San Pablo City, known for its seven lakes.

Serving as coordinators were Mandy Marino, owner of Café Lago; Emily Tajo, chairman of Friends of Rodrigo Duterte (FoRD); Gerlyn Ferrer, owner of Blue Danube School; and Rolly Inciong, president of Academia de San Ignacio de Loyola (Asil).

Inspirational speaker at the opening ceremony was Msgr. Gerry Bitoon, vicar general of the Catholic Church in Laguna.

A known environmental advocate, Bitoon called on the citizens to sustain their love for the environment through cleanliness campaigns; appealed to the residents to keep their surroundings clean at all times; and challenged the city government to strengthen law enforcement on cleanliness and environmental protection.

San Pablo City Mayor Loreto Amante

responded by announcing that the city government will deputize citizens to assist in law enforcement in the lakes area. He appealed to the citizens to continue their partnership with the city government in its development efforts.

Laguna Vice Gov. Karen Agapay, a resident of San Pablo City, was among the volunteers.

Some 100 fisherfolks living in the Sampalok Lake area participated in the cleanup.

Organizations and schools represented in the event include Café Lago, FoRD, Blue Danube, Asil, Interact Club of Asil, Armed Forces of the Philippines Reservists Command, Rotary Club of San Pablo, Rotary Club of San Pablo City Central, Kiwanis Siete Lagos, Kiwanis Lake City, Kiwanis Buklod San Pablo, Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry-San Pablo City Inc., Seven Lakes Lions, Lake City Lions, Emerald Lions, Lions Host, Apex Club, Apex Women’s Club, San Pablo Bar Association, Boy Scouts of the Philippines, Free and Accepted Masons, San Pablo City Force Multipliers, Friends of Seven Lakes Foundation, Guardians, Muslim Brotherhood, San Pablo Medical Society, Cavite-Laguna-Batangas-Quezon Sniper 135/150/X1R Riders, Public Schools Teachers Association and Police Hotline Movement.

D

By Manuel T. Cayon | Mindanao Bureau Chief

AVAO CITY—The loss of biodiversity cover traced to overfishing and destructive fishing practices has been blamed for the declining fish catch in the country’s prime fishing ground.

This was pointed out by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), as it gathered fisheries experts from governments and the private sectors across Southeast Asia to a program seeking for more sustainable fisheries activities in their respective countries.

In the Philippines the FAO is taking note of the sharp decline in fish catch in the Samar Sea, whose location along the Pacific Rim once made it a prime fishing area in the country. “By 2050, catches of main fish species could decline by up to 40 percent in the tropics, where livelihoods, food and nutrition security strongly depend on the fisheries sector. But in the Samar Sea, the situation is much more urgent,” the FAO warned.

In the last 30 years, the UN agency said the fish catch has dropped from 8 kilograms (kg) per day to

40% The estimated decline of catches of main fish species in the tropics by 2050

less than 3.5 kg, citing the Samar Sea Fisheries Management Plan of 2016. The FAO also said “various studies conducted by the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources [BFAR], FAO and the Samar State University further underscore the considerable loss of biodiversity in this once-prime fishing site.”

It said an earlier survey found that, of the 50 commercially important fish species that existed in the Samar Sea in the 1980s, only

10 remained a decade later. “The continued degradation of resources poses severe implications to the livelihoods and food security of the areas’ more than 23,000 fishers,” said José Luis Fernández, FAO representative in the Philippines.

“We are presented with the challenge of balancing human development needs with resourceconservation efforts in order to ensure long-term and sustainable benefits.” It said the degradation of the Samar Sea “is linked to the increase in commercial fishing, overfishing and destructive fishing methods, but its impact is disproportionately felt by families who depend on the ocean for their food and livelihoods.”

“Driven by the basic need to eat and earn a living, many fishers in the area practice trawling, or literally scraping the bottom of the sea to catch bottom-dwelling fish and shellfish. This damages the coral reef and seabed, and contributes to the massive increase of by-catch,” Fernández added.

By-catch refers to the marine life, “such as turtles, finfish and juveniles, which are incidentally hauled with the catch in trawling.”

“While some of this by-catch, specifically the low-value and trash fish, helps supplement the incomes of subsistence fishers and addresses household food insecurity, its prolonged negative impact on marine biodiversity

could lead to the eventual closure of the area’s remaining productive fishing grounds,” the FAO warned.

The FAO said it was putting up the regional program for sustainable fisheries, “a multi-country initiative implemented by the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Centre in the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and Vietnam.” The program “involves a decision-making process that equally considers the economic needs of coastal communities and the necessity of conserving marine resources.” The BFAR represents the country in the program.

The FAO committed technical and operational support to the BFAR as it works with the Samar Sea Alliance of Local Government Units, local fisheries managers, planners and development officers “to formulate equitable policies and locally responsive guidelines for the sustainable management of fisheries in the Samar Sea, including reducing by-catch from trawl fishing.”

The FAO and the BFAR would also catalogue fishing gear and conduct critical habitat mapping and zoning of fishing grounds. “In addition to exploring the potential benefits of establishing a closed season, the two agencies are also assessing livelihood requirements and building the capacity of stakeholders to sustain rehabilitation activities,” it said.

NatGeo, WWF outfit Mindoro tribesmen, park rangers with solar lamps, patrol kits

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he National Geographic Channel (NGC) and World W ide Fu nd for Nat u re (WWF) recently gave 50 portable solar lamps to the Taw’Buid—an indigenous Mangyan group inhabiting the remote mountains of Mindoro. Park rangers protecting the Mounts Iglit-Baco National Park also received new hammocks, rain gear and all-weather patrol uniforms from the Primer Group of Cos. The deploy ment is part of NGC’s Earth Day Run, which has been supporting WWF projects since 2013. Race proceeds reforested Isabela forests with 20,000 fruit-bearing trees in 2013 and deployed fiberglass boats for Palawan fishermen in 2014.

Proceeds from NGC ’s 2015 race funded the solar-lamp deployment, which was held inside the Mounts Iglit-Baco National Park on September 3. About 15 million Filipinos lack regular access to electricity and Mindoro’s Taw’Buid tribesfolk are no exception, relying on kerosene and firewood to light their homes.

“We gave portable solar lamps because burning fossil fuels accelerates climate change,” WWFPhilippines President and CEO Joel Palma said. “Solar energy is an economical and safe power source because there are no emissions to trigger respiratory ailments. Our goal is to cover basic Filipino needs while fighting climate change.”

The reclusive, forest-dwelling Taw’Buid or Batangan tribe is the most numerous of the eight Mangyan subgroups, with approximately 20,000 members.

Most live in simple thatched huts, few of which have been seen by outsiders, owing to the traditional fear harbored by Taw’Buid for outsiders, called Siganon.

Many still wear Amakan loincloths made from pounded tree bark and smoke potent tobacco in pipes, called bakto.

As very few have access to electricity, most cut trees for firewood,

A family of tamaraw (Bubalus mindorensis) photographed in the wild. The tamaraw Conservation Programme, Far Eastern University, WWF and many allies have been working to double the number of tamaraw from 300 to 600 by 2020. Tamaraw numbers have grown to 413 from 327 in 2012. Gregg Yan / WWF

Newly outfitted park rangers and their Taw’Buid tracker spot wildlife from the summit of Mount McGowen in the Mounts Iglit-Baco National Park, last refuge of the critically endangered tamaraw, a legally protected species. Gregg Yan/WWF

used to both light homes and provide heat in fire pits, where families congregate and talk each night.

The solar lamps will help ease the strain on Mindoro’s forests while giving tribes both light and a means to charge what few electronic gadgets they have.

“No longer shall our people rely on fire for light. Thank you for the gift of eternal light,” Taw’Buid Overall Tribal Chief Fausto Novelozo said during the deployment.

The 24-strong corps of park rangers were equipped by the Primer Group of Cos. with allweather khaki uniforms. “With the proper clothing, our rangers will be better able to protect themselves from the elements to more vigorously fulfill their tasks. We’re glad to be part of the project,” Primer Group of Cos. Program Manager Kristine Villaflor added.

“Each of our park rangers patrol around 1,000 hectares of land.

Constantly pelted by both sun rays and raindrops, they need proper gear, such as all-weather uniforms,

Park rangers, led by Mounts Iglit-Baco Park Supt. Rodel Boyles (holding the Philippine flag) show off their new uniforms, provided by the Primer Group of Cos., National Geographic Channel and WWF. National Geographic Channel

Taw’Buid elder Henry Timuyog shows off his family’s new solar lamp, courtesy of NGC and WWF. The reclusive Taw’Buid live simple lives as upland farmers and hunt game in the rugged mountains of Mindoro. Gregg Yan/WWF

boots, hammocks and rain ponchos, to help dispatch their duties.

Thank you for the help, as it will help us better protect the park,” said Mounts Iglit-Baco Park Supt.

Rodel Boyles. Since 2012, WWF has been working with the Tamaraw Conservation Programme, Far Eastern University, Banco De Oro Unibank, local government of Occidental Mindoro and the Taw’Buid people to restore the forests of the Mounts Iglit-Baco National Park,

tural identity of the Taw’Buid people while protecting upland forests and ensuring a steady flow of water for the people of Mindoro. The Philippines celebrates Tamaraw Month each October.

“We’re grateful for the opportunity to gift Mindoro’s Taw’Buid tribesfolk with economical lighting solutions, like solar lamps.

The NatGeo Earth Day Run raises awareness on sustainable environment solutions and helps

which hosts the world’s largest population of tamaraw a critically endangered dwarf buffalo and one of the country’s national icons.

A pressing objective is to double the number of wild tamaraw from 300 to 600 by 2020. From 327 heads in 2012, the wild buffalo’s numbers soared to 413 by April 2016. The project, dubbed “Tams-2” or Tamaraw Times Two by 2020, aims not just to conserve tamaraw, but to protect the cul-

as many people as possible. We hope the solar lamps will make a positive impact on the lives of the Taw’Buid and contribute to keeping Mindoro’s forests intact,” FOX Networks Group Senior President and General Manager Jude Turcuato Vice said.

Held in April, NGC’s Earth Day Run 2016 will next fund WWF’s marine conservation drive for Apo Reef in Mindoro, the largest coral reef in Asia.

A14 Monday, September 26, 2016 • Editor: Angel R. Calso

Opinion BusinessMirror

editorial

Killing foreign investment?

I

t is absolutely your right and even obligation to vehemently agree or disagree with any and everything President Duterte says. However, the discussions about the supposed impact of his pronouncements from cursing the European Union to wanting United States Special Forces troops to leave Mindanao are bordering on the absurd.

For example, one of those “My cousin knows someone who talked to…” received many comments a couple of weeks ago. In this case, it was that two French travel agencies would not send tourists to the Philippines if the death penalty was restored. The death penalty is a highly contentious subject and every company has a right to do business or not to do business with any person or country that they wish.

However, in this case, that means these travel agencies are not booking potential clients to the following nations that executed a convicted criminal in 2016: China, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and, of course, the United States. That list does not include the multitude of other nations, like Sudan and Pakistan, which are not high on the “Places We Must Visit” list.

As a point of information, the Philippines received 35,000 French tourists last year. Thailand welcomed 680,000 French tourists to visit their country. The last execution in the Philippines was in 1999; Thailand last executed a criminal in 2009.

The greater concern may be the overall effect of President Duterte’s “colorful” comments (in US President Barack Obama’s words) and the violent war on drugs may have on foreign investment to the country.

Foreign-investment money is controlled by people—not robots—who have opinions and biases that go beyond the number crunching. The numbers will always be foremost with long-term business viability and profitability at the top. But there are many factors that make up profitability, including labor costs, infrastructure expenses, regulatory costs, taxes, and access to local and regional markets.

The Duterte administration has not clearly defined its longerterm economic policies in terms of specific implementation. An example is the potential power shortage and high power cost. That is not beneficial for investment but it is still early in the term.

Nonetheless, foreign money does demand stability no matter where it goes, even in its home country. The fact that the outcome of the US presidential election offers such striking policy differences and is in effect tied at this point has put most new domestic investment plans on hold. The same is likely true for the Philippines.

Foreign investment is probably looking more at how the Philippines and the people are reacting to President Duterte’s highly controversial statements and whether there is a hint of government instability. We would look for this in the steadiness of the President’s Cabinet, as well as on the street.

It is nearly the fourth quarter and planning for 2017 is beginning. If the administration can keep the people on its side and offer some regulatory changes more encouraging to foreign investment, 2017 could potentially be an outstanding foreign-investment year.

If not, 2017 will hold some serious economic challenges.

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BusinessMirror A broader look at today’s business ✝ Ambassador Antonio L. Cabangon Chua Founder

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am grateful and very pleased to share that my wife, lawyer Patricia Bunye-Rojas, is one of the 14 awardees of PeopleAsia’s Women of Style & Substance 2016. She will be joining the rest of the awardees at the awarding ceremonies tonight, September 26. PeopleAsia’s Women of Style & Substance is on its 11th year of recognizing women who possess the unique combination of good looks and great accomplishments.

Bunye-Rojas is being recogni zed for her successes—inc lud ing her achievements as an international lawyer and as the first Filipino and Southeast Asian to become president of the global organization Licensing Executives Society International (Lesi). Lesi is an association of 33 national and regional member-societies made up of men and women who are interested in the transfer of technology, or licensing of intellectual-property rights.

Bunye-Rojas became active in the Asia-Pacific Committee before she became chairman of the same, leading it to become a solid group supported by strong personal relationships among its members. Her experiences as national society president and committee leader gave her the necessary advantages that proved helpful in her work on the Lesi Board, where she worked alongside international experts in the licensing community.

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PeopleAsia’s Women of Style & Substance awardees appear in the magazine’s AugustSeptember 2016 issue, now available at newsstands.

If you would like to read more updates and information on these impressive women, you can also visit peopleasia.ph.

Warm congratulations to all the awardees.

The other PeopleAsia Women of Style & Substance 2016 awardees are Jaclyn Jose, who is the Cannes 2016 Best Actress awardee for the film Ma’Rosa; Binibining Pilipinas Inter nationa l 2016 Kylie Versoza; Binibining Pilipinas Universe 2016 hopeful Maxine Medina; Rep. Geraldine Roman of the First District of Bataan, who is also the first transgender woman to win a seat in Congress; model Rissa Mananquil-Trillo, also the entrepreneur

behind makeup brand Happy Sk in; Rustan’s scion K atr ina Tantoco-Lobregat; President and CEO of Titania wines Tita Trillo; travel columnist for the Philippine Star Christine Dayrit; Kaye Zorrilla-Gamboa, the director for operations for Right Goods Philippines (Wella Philippines); microfinancing businesswoman and philanthropist Sheree Chua; multiawarded jewelr y designer Ann Ong; “ beauty preneur” Nik k i Tang , who is the CEO of DMark Cor p. and Der m Asia Corp.; and fashion designer Maureen Disini.

PeopleAsia’s Women of Style & Substance awardees appear in the magazine’s August-September 2016 issue, now availa b l e at n e w s s t a n d s . I f y o u would like to read more updates and information on these impressive women, you can also visit peopleasia.ph.

Warm congratulations to all the awardees, and my heartfelt gratitude to PeopleAsia for continuing to recognize women who possess commendable qualities and exquisite style.

Traversing PPPs is like a ‘Spartan Race’. Aroo!

By Alberto Agra

PPP Lead

Lorenzo M. Lomibao Jr., Gerard S. Ramos Lyn B. Resurreccion, Efleda P. Campos Ruben M. Cruz Jr. Angel R. Calso

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‘PeopleAsia’s Women of Style & Substance 2016

Continued from A1 Your columnist joined his first (and not the last) “Spartan Race” two weeks ago. It was the shortest distance offered, called the “Sprint”—almost 10 kilometers interspersed with 26 obstacles.

Your columnist almost gave up under the soaring heat of close to 100 degrees. He was teary-eyed when he crossed the finish line and claimed his first medal. That was how difficult it was. Aroo! (in some segments, it was Aray!)

PPPs are also not walks-in-thepark. Like the Spartan Race, PPPs have a mix of easy and difficult obstacles. And like PPPs, there is no Spartan Race with impossible hurdles. All are conquerable. However, Spartans, like PPP proponents, must be prepared and must be committed with a vision.

n Setting the vision. The goal of any Spartan Race, in the open category, is to complete the course and live to brag about it (smiley).

For the elite category, the goal is to compete and finish the course within the shortest time possible.

For PPPs, the objective is far-reaching. The ultimate objective is better quality of life for the people. Success is not measured by the signing of a PPP contract. n Going for the “Trifecta.”

Better quality of life cannot be achieved with a single PPP project. PPPs, therefore, are not just transactional. Transformation is the core of PPPs. It should be pursued as a development and change strategy. Being a true Spartan means joining more than one race.

This columnist’s intermediate goal is doing a “Trifecta”—three races to complete the three-sided

The goal of any Spartan Race, in the open category, is to complete the course and live to brag about it (smiley).

For the elite category, the goal is to compete and finish the course within the shortest time possible.

For PPPs, the objective is far-reaching. The ultimate objective is better quality of life for the people. Success is not measured by the signing of a PPP contract. medal. Sustainability calls for a lifestyle change. n Hurdling the obstacles. Going uphill under a barbwire, climbing a 6-foot wall, touching a bell after a rope climb, kicking a bell after a series of rings and horizontal bar, and carrying a bucket full of gravel are some of the obstacles in a Spartan Race. PPPs are also obstacle-ridden.

There are legal (e.g., complying with nationality requirements), financial (e.g., reaching finan-

cial closure) and technical (e.g., possessing the required track record) hurdles for successful PPP transactions. Having a clear PPP policy and framework is another.

Securing the award in a competitive and transparent process is a prerequisite to move on. Obtaining regulatory approvals and passing audits are considered uphill climbs. Fixing reasonable and appropriate tariffs at the right time are challenging hurdles.

Addressing changes in policies midstream and successor risks are tougher obstacles. These challenges must be recognized and are conquerable. n Getting ready. PPPs, like Spartan Races, are not spur-of-themoment, fad-driven, let-fate-decide type of engagements. Private sector proponents, government agencies, civil-society organizations and regulators, like their Spartan counterparts, must be ready. Preparation, research, due diligence and steadfast commitment, even failures, are ingredients for success.

So, let us get ready for the next evolution. Exciting and challenging times lie ahead. Aroo! Let us Spartan up!

opinion@businessmirror.com.ph

Opinion

In aid of legislation

What to expect from the Expanded PWD Act of 2016

BusinessMirror

Atty. Lorna Patajo-Kapunan

legally speaking

S

eparate congressional hearings and investigations are currently being conducted by both houses, left and right.

Some are still bewildered why Congress is spending, if not wasting, its time and resources on these hearings and investigations, instead of focusing on its mandate to legislate. To them, discovering who are involved in the proliferation of drug trade inside the country’s national penitentiary or who is the mastermind behind the alleged extrajudicial killings in Davao is beyond the functions of Congress.

To those who are already fed up with the dose of entertainment and/ or drama provided by the congressional investigations, unfortunately, on its face, our lawmakers are still asking within their powers granted by no less than the Constitution.

Section 21, Article VI of the 1987 Constitution states that “[t]he Senate or the House of Representatives or any of its respective Committees may conduct inquiries in aid of legislation in accordance with it’s duly published rules of procedure. The right of persons appearing in or affected by such shall be respected.”

Inquiries in aid of legislation are inter alia, undertaken as tools to enable the legislative body to gather information and, thus, legislate wisely and effectively, and to determine whether there is a need to improve existing laws or enact new or remedial legislation. These inquiries, however, seem to have divided the country. The comprehensive coverage of these inquiries, in all forms of media, including social media, has not helped in uniting the people who have been divided since the election. Worse, these inquiries, which are supposed to assist our lawmakers in enacting legislation, have reached international recognition, albeit in a bad light.

Inquiries in aid of legislation are inter alia, undertaken as tools to enable the legislative body to gather information and, thus, legislate wisely and effectively, and to determine whether there is a need to improve existing laws or enact new or remedial legislation.

These inquiries, however, seem to have divided the country. The comprehensive coverage of these inquiries, in all forms of media, including social media, has not helped in uniting the people who have been divided since the election.

With all the apparent damage that these congressional inquiries are causing the country and our people, we could only hope that these will end on a good note, with our lawmakers bringing much-needed developments to our local legislation. A genuine effort to improve legislation, and not politics, should be the driving force behind these inquiries.

Trump’s contrarian Silicon Valley supporters

By Leonid Bershidsky Bloomberg View

D

Jeffrey Salazar

onald Trump has few supporters in liberal Silicon Valley —even Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member, who spoke for the Republican nominee at the Republican National Convention, hasn’t given a cent to the campaign.

Yet, the tech world doesn’t unanimously favor Democrats.

Consider, for example, the financial support that Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey has given to a pro-Trump trolling campaign. Luckey, 24, sold his virtual reality start-up to Facebook for $2 billion after Oculus became a crowdfunding star. He has confirmed to the Daily Beast that he’s donated money to a group called Nimble America to produce memes and negative posts about Hillary Clinton. Nimble America also put up a billboard outside Pittsburgh with a large image of Clinton’s face and the legend, “Too Big to Jail.” Luckey explained that he’d met the mememakers behind the group on Facebook and offered them money because he “would love to see more of that stuff.”

It’s this kind of surprising support that has made Trump a strong contender for the presidency.

Nimble America was set up by two moderators of the r/The_Donald thread on Reddit, which is full of not just antiClinton, but also anti-immigrant and outright racist memes. Luckey made it sound as if he just enjoyed the trolling as “a real jolly good time.” That would ring hollow to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who offered to launch Trump into outer space after the candidate lashed out at him as the owner of The Washington Post.

Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, wouldn’t see it the same as Luckey either: He withdrew Apple’s support for the Republican National Convention this year after Trump called for a boycott of Apple products because of the company’s reluctance to help US law-enforcement decrypt a terrorist’s iPhone.

The Silicon Valley has long leaned Democratic or even further left. This year the most typical donor of the Green Party candidate Jill Stein is a male

software engineer from California, according to Crowdpac, an organization that analyzes political donation data.

Trump’s right-wing views are unappealing to this constituency. A group of tech executives and venture capitalists, including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and a few other important names in the industry, published a strongly worded anti-Trump letter in July. Trump hasn’t been nice to the Valley’s aristocracy such as Bezos and Cook, and they have no reason to back him. According to data from Crowdpac, the technology industry has donated all of $225,000 to the Trump campaign.

Clinton has collected $6.1 million from tech donors, according to Crowdpac, out of her total of $510 million.

Barack Obama had did better with tech workers in both of his presidential campaigns.

Neither Thiel nor Luckey has described himself as a hardcore Trump fan. The PayPal cofounder is a libertarian who believes that an increasingly incompetent government has run down the economy. Luckey claims to be a believer in politically incorrect fun. It’s not easy to find people in tech who would be against trade or immigration as Trump says he is: The industry wins from both.

Those who back the billionaire do so out of contrariness, the spirit of disruption and rebellion that is as important to Silicon Valley’s soul as social liberalism.

The rare open Trump backers are not so much pro-Trump as anti-Clinton. To them, she stands for the bland, faceless status quo; Thiel says the US needs to be “rebuilt” and that Clinton would be a one-term president because she’d drive the economy into a new crisis. Luckey, in one of his Reddit posts as “NimbleRichMan,” wrote of “fighting the American elite.”

This doesn’t present any serious danger to Clinton in Silicon Valley, where polls show she has more than double Trump’s support. It’s just that the backing, at least initially, was less enthusiastic than for Obama, and techies’ belief that she can shake things up and bring positive change is weaker than it was with the outgoing president.

DEBIT CREDIT

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n March 23 former President Benigno S. Aquino III signed Republic Act (RA) 10754, a law granting expanded benefits and privileges to persons with disability (PWDs).

Authored by Leyte Rep. Martin G. Romualdez, the law is an alignment to the Expanded Senior Citizens (SC) Act, or RA 9994. Under the new law, PWDs are entitled to value-added tax (VAT) exemption on top of the 20-percent discount they currently enjoy.

Exemption from the VAT and the grant of 20-percent discount include the fees and charges collected on services by hotels, restaurants and similar establishments, admission fees on cinema houses, concert halls and other amusement places, purchase of medicines, medical and dental services, including laboratory and doctor fees; fare on land-, air- and sea-transport vehicles; funeral and burial services, including funeral expenses and memorial lot; and educational assistance for PWDs pursuing primary up to post-tertiary level, as well as PWD pursuing technical and vocational courses.

In case of agricultural and ma-

rine goods and other basic commodities, the law allows the Departments of Trade and Industry and Agriculture to grant special discounts to PWDs. All commercial establishments should also provide an express lane for PWDs or, in its absence, priority shall be given to them.

Aside from the said benefits, the law also allows PWDs to be treated as dependent and deductible for income-tax personal-exemption purposes. To be claimed as a tax deduction, the PWD must be within the fourth civil degree of consanguinity or affinity of the taxpayer regardless of the PWD age, as long as the PWD is not gainfully employed and chiefly dependent on the taxpayer.

The PWD must be a Filipino citizen to be covered by the law.

To be entitled by the said benefits, the PWD shall present any of the following: identification card (ID) issued by city or municipal mayor or the barangay captain of the

Monday, September 26, 2016 A15

place where the PWD resides, an ID issued by National Council for the Welfare of Disabled Persons (NCWPD); and passport of the PWD concerned.

Since the Expanded PWD Act affects business establishments, we can expect that the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) will soon be issuing guidelines to implement the law. In view of the fact that the Expanded PWD Act is almost the same with the Expanded Senior Citizens (SC) law, we can anticipate that there will be identical guidelines with the bookkeeping and invoicing requirements, requisites for the deductibility of PWDs discount and VAT exemption on their purchases.

In the case of PWD as qualified dependent(s) for income-tax purposes, the law doesn’t provide the amount of exemption. The current value of exemption for a dependent is P25,000, which can be the same basis for the amount deductible for a PWD dependent.

If the PWD will be added together with the existing limit of four qualified dependents, a revised withholding-tax table for employees must be issued by the BIR. New codes, such as S5—single with four dependent children and one dependent PWD, or ME5—married employee with four dependent children and one dependent PWD and so on might be added in the table. The law also doesn’t indicate the maximum number of

FDA’s dangerous deals with reporters

By Megan McArdle Bloomberg View

I

S the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) manipulating what stories we get on its decisions? That’s the suggestion of a new article in Scientific American on the ways that the FDA controls who sees information when, and how journalists can report on it. The practice sounds pretty scurrilous.

Sometimes a source gives information to journalists before a public announcement in exchange for an agreement that the journalist won’t publish the information until an agreed-upon time. This process—called an embargo—is actually reasonable and beneficial to the public, because it gives reporters time to dig into a technical subject without feeling that they have to only skim the paper quickly and dash off an article so they can be the first to publish and get the scoop.

The FDA’s “close hold ” embargo is an innovation I’d never heard of, however: It forbids reporters to talk to any third parties until the embargo date and time. To a reporter, this is outra-

geous: Sources can control what they tell us, but they normally aren’t allowed to control who else we talk to. However, in the case of the FDA, there may be some argument for it.

Someone who worked closely with the FDA in the Bush White House points out to me that the FDA is not really like other scientific agencies. When the National Institutes of Health releases a paper, it’s releasing its own research and, however interesting, it’s probably not going to have huge immediate impact on American society. The FDA, however, is often releasing announcements about other peoples’ research. And that information can dramatically move markets.

If reporters go poking around asking other sources, “So, how do you feel about the FDA’s new ecigarette rules,” there’s a danger that people will start trading on that information. The Bush White House continued the Clinton-era policy forbidding the FDA to provide advance materials or briefings to reporters. This “close embargo” approach may well have been the FDA’s way of trying to let reporters go deeper into the story, without risking leaks.

The problem is that once officials start granting this sort of special access, it’s very easy for the agency to use it, not to protect markets from leaks, but to protect the agency from stories it doesn’t like. The Scientific American article offers rich examples of how this is happening at the FDA. For one thing, the agency seems to be using it far too broadly, for things that have little market-moving potential. I doubt that an announcement of a new public-health ad really required a close-hold embargo. This raises the specter that the purpose of such embar-

PWD that a taxpayer can claim as deduction for income-tax purposes, hence, there is a possibility that the rules may provide for more than one PWD who can be included as qualified dependent.

For basic commodities, a possible 5-percent discount will be given to PWD on selected basic commodities, such as, but not limited to, canned sardines, tuna, luncheon meat, coffee, bread and cooking oil, in reference with the discount rate given to a senior citizen, provided that the said purchases are solely and exclusively for their use and benefit.

Business establishments must be vigilant on impact of the PWD law in the operations, compliance, taxation and reportorial requirements for the business. Let us wait for the issuance of the guidelines from the concerned government agencies.

Jeffrey Galang Salazar is a Certified Public Accountant and Master in Business Administration degree holder. He is currently connected with Tong Hsing Electronics Phils.

Inc., Mold Parts Manufacturing Asia Inc. and Pamantasan ng Cabuyao.

This column accepts contributions from accountants, especially articles that are of interest to the accountancy profession, in particular, and to the business community, in general. These can be e-mailed to boa.secretariat.@gmail.com

goes has moved beyond controlling the flow of market-sensitive information, and onto ensuring that stories are produced by a select group of reporters given limited information, which will then shape the subsequent coverage of the issue.

For another, Scientific American offers ample evidence that the FDA kept a Fox News reporter in the dark despite letting other networks in on the embargo. This at minimum presents the appearance of wrongdoing, if Fox were excluded for political rather than for journalistic reasons.

A creeping political bias is exactly what we should expect: When agencies and government officials can control the flow of information to get more favorable stories and punish reporters who displease them, they will.

It’s the responsibility of voters and citizens to demand better: The FDA should use embargoes responsibly or not at all, returning to the old practice of releasing the information to everyone at once.

The good schools, the bad ones and the ugly ways we rank them

By Stephen L. Carter Bloomberg View

T

here is a certain tragic irony in the fact that a crackdown on US colleges with low graduation rates was announced during the very week when the Times Higher Education Supplement published its annual list of the world’s best universities. The coincidence provokes the thought that there is too much of this going on.

By “this” I mean the constant effort in higher education to sort the best from the not-best, and the best among the best from the best, and the best among the best among the best from the best among the best.

(Try saying that twice quickly.)

There are so many rankings now, using so many different methodologies. The Times Higher Education Supplement list—the THE list, as it is awkwardly known—emphasizes research done at the school. The US News and World Report Rankings, which also came out this month, emphasize 15 factors, including alumni giving, graduation rate and admission selectivity. There are lists of the best party schools, the schools

with the best teachers, the schools with the best dormitories.

Others have said it, and so will I. Such rankings are basically silly.

They yield little useful information to would-be consumers of education. At the very top of the THE list, Oxford University has supplanted Cal Tech, which had a five-year run at the top. Does this mean that you should redirect your budding physicist to England?

Even when you think you’re getting information, you may not be.

US News has created, among other things, a list of law schools ranked by the percentage of graduates who wind up earning a clerkship with a federal judge. But what good does this

do? Even an applicant whose heart is already set on a clerkship would find such a list of small utility. If school A sends a higher proportion of its graduates into the clerkship ranks than does school B, can the applicant be sure that it will be easier to impress a judge if she attends school A? Not unless she has a lot of other facts, too—for example, the rate at which the students at each school apply for clerkships—facts US News does not supply and has no easy way to discover.

The many lists, crude and opaque as they might be, have largely swamped the traditional idea of searching in a personalized way not for the best school but for the school that best fits each applicant. Moreover, the existence of the lists— and the fact that students and their parents pay so much attention to them—encourages gaming. A former president of Northeastern University, from 1996 to 2006, admitted making a “systematic effort” to improve his school’s US News ranking.

He broke no rules. He simply chose to emphasize things that would move the school higher. This decision was

driven not by an assessment of the needs of pedagogy, but by a recognition of market realities.

Other schools have been accused of outright lying—excuse me, fudging the numbers—to improve their rankings. Several law school graduates have sued the institutions that granted their degrees, claiming that they were deceived about employment opportunities. But judges have been unsympathetic. The New York Times referred to one recent lawsuit, won by the defendant school at trial, as “the first—and perhaps last— such case to reach the courtroom.”

In short, the courts are unlikely to fix all of this for us.

Which brings us to the potential crackdown on schools at what we might call the other end of the list.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the member-organizations that comprise the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions have decided to take a closer look at schools that graduate under 25 percent of their students in four years. I understand the impulse, but the tool of measurement is crude.

2nd Front Page BusinessMirror BusinessMirror

A16 Monday, September 26, 2016

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DOF to ‘look closely’ at new incentives for tourism zones T

By Ma. Stella F. Arnaldo Special to the BusinessMirror

HE Tourism Infrastructure and Enterprise Zone Authority (Tieza) will be drafting a bill to drop the “sunset provision” for fiscal incentives for tourism enterprise zones (TEZs) in the Tourism Act of 2009.

“We are preparing a bill to remove the sunset provision in Republic Act [RA] 9353, the Tourism Act of 2009, on the grant of incentives since the Bureau of Internal Revenue [BIR] did not issue guidelines for the last years,” Tieza COO Guiller Asido said.

This developed as the Department of Finance (DOF) said it would study proposed revenue regulations covering incentives for TEZ locators.

In a text message to the BusinessMirror, Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III said: “We’ll be taking a close look at [the pro-

₧232.3B Estimates of unrealized investments in the tourism sector after fiscal incentives were not granted to TEZs posed incentives for TEZ locators].”

He added: “We need to determine how much revenue losses will be incurred with such a measure viz the potential benefits to

government in terms of taxes, and to the people living in and around those TEZs.”

The DOF is currently preparing a comprehensive package of tax reforms, including restructuring of fiscal incentives for investors, for presentation to lawmakers in October.

The proposed revenue regulation governing fiscal incentives to TEZ locators has been pending with the BIR since 2010, according to Tieza officials. Because these fiscal incentives were not granted to TEZs,

Tieza estimates about P232.33 billion in investments into the tourism sector were lost. (See “BIR revenue regulation sought to stem tourism investment losses” in the BusinessMirror, September 23, 2016.)

While Tieza could not provide estimated revenue losses from the grant of the tax-incentives locators, it said in a briefing paper the development of flagship TEZs would create 10,000 rooms (20 percent) of total additional room requirements for the industry;

support an additional 1.7 million tourists; and deliver 280,000 additional jobs.

Asido said Tourism Secretary Wanda Corazon T. Teo “already wrote a letter to the BIR [renewing the request for said fiscal incentives], and we will be meeting them, as well.”

Under RA 9353, said fiscal incentives for TEZ locators are supposed to be granted until 2019, the so-called sunset provision. The Tieza official explained: “By removing that provision, we are hoping to provide incentives beyond 2019, since we lost six years due to the absence of a BIR revenue regulation.”

He added that once the bill is completed, Tieza will be requesting “the committees on tourism in both houses [of Congress] to sponsor it.”

Formerly known as the Philippine Tourism Authority, Tieza is a unit of the DOT tasked to “develop, manage and supervise tourism-infrastructure projects in the country. It shall supervise and regulate the cultural, economic and environmentally sustainable development of TEZs toward the primary objective of encouraging investments therein.”

Under this law, fiscal incentives promised TEZs include a sixyear income-tax holiday, renewable for another six years; 5-percent gross income taxation; net operating loss carryover; and the tax- and duty-free importation of capital and transportation equipment and consumable goods.

Nonfiscal incentives include the employment of foreign nationals; the special investor’s resident visa; the lease of land by foreign nationals; the social responsibility incentive; and the nonrepatriation of investments.

Tieza has identified five flagship TEZs: San Vicente, Palawan; Rizal Park Complex, Manila; Mount Samat Shrine of Valor, Bataan; Bucas Grande, Surigao del Norte; and Panglao Bay Premiere Properties, Bohol. As flagship TEZs, these will be operated and managed by Tieza.

There are private TEZs that have been approved, as well, and are just waiting for fiscal incentives to embark on their expansion projects. These are Ciudad de Victoria in Bulacan, Bravo Golf Resort in Dumaguete, Hijo Plantation in Davao, Queen’s Castle in Cebu and Resorts World in Parañaque.