Make Abaya answer for car plate mess

“Never mind that I still don’t have car plates, so long as someone is jailed for it.” That text from a talk-radio listener sums up the taxpayers’ exasperation with the departing Liberal Party admin. The rant is against the impunity of LP president and Transport Sec. Joseph Abaya. Publicly he had been warned against contracting an unfit bidder for vehicle platemaking. Still he persisted. As expected the contractor absconded. Millions of vehicle owners who paid for the new plates have received nothing but lame excuses. Meanwhile, Abaya’s contracted LP-mates loused up the commuter train maintenance. Yet in the midst of resulting traffic jams, President Noynoy Aquino praised him as “a good boy.” Now people want justice. And it’s not only for the plate and train messes. There are other abuses: Abaya’s 2000-percent increase of fees to secret consultants, his family junket to a transport confab in Tokyo, and the infamous “tanim-bala” extortions at the Manila airport. Those are the unpunished crimes for which the electorate repudiated Aquino’s anointed successor and opted for Rody Duterte. He has the dossier on the crooks.

The 2013 bidding for the platemaking was irregular from the start. The project was to replace old plates and issue new “tamper-proof” ones, over five years for P3.8 billion. All Abaya had from Congress was P560 million for 2013, not the requisite Multi-Year Obligation Allotment. Still he proceeded. The bidders then protested the presence of an unqualified consortium. Being a convicted forger, the Filipino firm Power Plates Inc. was debarred from government contracting; its Dutch partner JKG Knierem Ltd. was undercapitalized. Abaya nonetheless granted the deal to that very inapt duo, illegally advancing to it P478 million. The first hundred prototype plates issued to new car registrants were substandard, the metal crumpling like paper under Metro Manila floodwaters. Far from being tamper-proof, they could be unscrewed for replacement with fakes like before. Still Abaya ordered production full-blast. Kickbacks apparently had changed hands; it was an election year, with the LP angling to dominate Congress and the local governments, At last the Commission on Audit (COA) blew the whistle, stopping the government from any more payments and demanding refund of the P478 million.

By then the contractors had had 300,000 pairs of car plates and 400,000 pieces for motorcycles made. Scrimping, they did it not in Europe as presented but in India. When the shipment arrived in 11 containers, they couldn’t pay the import duty of P25 million. Months lapsed, the tax rising to P40 million, and the warehousing to P5 million. Last April the Customs bureau tried to get Abaya out of the scrape by donating the confiscated goods to his office. But wait, how about the hundreds of millions collected from vehicle registrants, and more paid to the missing contractors? The Supreme Court halted the donation for legal study. Years of no vehicle plates have resulted to chaos in the streets. Abaya had no moral ascendancy to impose “no plates, no travel” on motorists. Police had no basis by which to identify crime getaway vehicles. Murders-for-hire, kidnappings, rapes, robberies, and narco-trafficking rose, courtesy of Abaya and abettor Aquino. Worst hit was Mega Manila, where traffic has been snarled since 2013 as the commuter railways deteriorated under Abaya’s thieving LP maintenance contractors.

Abaya should have been removed for earlier open-and-shut cases. Also in 2013 he brought along his father, mother, brother, cousin, and nephew to a transport ministers’ conference in Tokyo, There were more Abayas – six -- than government transport experts in the ten-man delegation. In the ensuing public outcry, Malacañang let Abaya off with a mere claim that the relatives had traveled on personal money. There was no investigation if, say, they had ridden on Philippine embassy limos, or wined and dined and shopped on official expense. In the 1980s an Australian PM had had to resign for abuse of office when his wife, traveling to London days ahead of him, had a mere two suitcases loaded onto the government jet on his flight home. In the Philippines the admin that claimed to be on “Daang Matuwid (Straight Path)” let Abaya stray as often as he pleased.

Another offense for which Abaya should have been removed earlier was his fund abuse. In all he had paid P354.497 million in consultancies in 2014. It was a 2000-percent jump from the P17.452 million that predecessor transport chief Mar Roxas paid out in 2012. In 2013, his first full year in office, Abaya paid P88 million to consultants. It was in gross violation of COA rules. He did not identify the consultants nor their work; neither was there any bidding and accomplishment reports of their projects. Abaya ignored COA requests for documents.

And how many departing Filipino overseas workers and Balikbayans were victimized by the bullet-planting shakedowns at the Manila International Airport? Records show more than 4,000 such incidents since P-Noy’s LP came to power in 2010. The few who courageously decried the extortion swore that security x-ray screeners had demanded P30,000, lest they be offloaded from flights. Abaya and the airport general manager Jose Angel Aquino Honrado, P-Noy’s cousin, abetted the crooks. They kept blaming the passengers for superstitiously sneaking in bullets on carry-on bags as amulets.

Duterte during the election campaign had vowed to make the airport extortionists swallow the bullets they kept planting on “provincials.” When he won, Abaya’s subordinates suddenly announced a new security policy. If there’s only one bullet “found,” it would be assumed as an innocent amulet, and the passenger would be let off. So, extortion can be removed after all. But Abaya’s men didn’t do it earlier. Like him, they made hay while the sun shone.

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