By EUGENE ADIONG
BACOLOD City — The Philippine Ports Authority’s (PPA) operation of the Banago port here has apparently made the Bacolod Real Estate Development Corp. (Bredco), which operates the city’s port, insecure.
It creates “unfair competition,” lawyer Roseller Maalat, counsel for Bredco, told Panay News.
Maalat said they would not have complained if Banago port is being operated by another private entity. But with PPA at the helm, “we (Bredco) are no match,” he said.
Maalat insisted that Banago port is directly competing with Bredco port. Worse, the “government uses the taxes we pay to compete with us,” he said.
Quoting former deputy House speaker Erin Tañada, he said government-operated ports are “anti-business.”
Maalat also questioned the status of the Banago port. Citing Commissioner of Customs vs. Court of Tax Appeals and Litonjua Shipping on July 31, 1993, he said the PPA cannot create and operate a port without authority from Congress.
“Is the Banago port a national port or a municipal port,” he asked. He said the Supreme Court decision says national ports are created by a legislation while municipal ports are created by an executive order.
Maalat said Bredco may soon seek “administrative remedies.”
Bredco earlier complained about the PPA’s accommodation of roll-on, roll-off vessels at the Banago port without an imprimatur from the Sangguniang Panlungsod on the port zone delineation.
Its president, Simplicio Palanca, the PPA’s operation of Banago port alone could “kill” the Bacolod City port operated by Bredco.
A port managed by a private entity cannot compete with a port managed by the government, he said in a letter to Vice Mayor Greg Gasataya and the Sangguniang Panlungsod dated June 10, 2014.
Palanca said there was no study conducted on the impact of the PPA-operated port on private port operators such as Bredco, which, for the past 50 years, had invested billions of pesos in the establishment of the city port.
He said Bredco was granted the right to operate and manage the Bacolod port by virtue of the 1961 agreement it had with the city government, which was concretized in the 1995 Comprehensive Revised Reclamation Agreement.
A new port here will “not only threaten revenues and taxes paid to the city but will eventually kill private port operation,” he said. “In the end, it is the city of Bacolod that will suffer.”
He said there are existing roro facilities at the Bredco port; putting up more at a PPA-managed port will not spur economic activity but will create unfair competition.
PPA manager Enrique Fuentebaja earlier said they are not competing with Bredco port but complement it instead./PN
