Future status of Agile known after Holy Week recess

Legislators are hoping that by the time they return from the Easter recess the future status of the US-funded Accelerating Growth Investments and Liberalization with Equity (Agile) would have been resolved with finality.

The Senate, acting as a committee on the whole, expressed alarm over the covert presence of Agile consultants in key government institutions – from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Department of Budget and Management, Department of Finance and the Department of Trade and Industry to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Board and the National Telecommunications Commission.

During heated Senate hearings, the senators were united in their demand that all Agile consultants – numbering at its peak to over 200 with several of them foreigners – attached to government institutions be evicted with immediate effect to stop them from imposing undue influence in the workings of the respective departments.

From their well-entrenched positions, Agile agents have been accused by senators and congressmen of formulating and steering legislative instruments that would benefit American interests at the expense of Filipino companies.

A good case in point – and what many informed people in the business community feel was Agile’s undoing – was its attempt to undermine the pre-need industry by working for it to be transferred from the regulatory authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission to that of the Insurance Commission.

As part of that well-publicized campaign to subvert the pre-need industry, Agile allegedly picked on the country’s biggest pre-need companies, thereby causing instability within the entire pre-need industry. However, the industry weathered the storm admirably.

The pre-need industry had well founded suspicions that should Agile succeed in its agenda it would pave the way for bi-US insurance companies to then move in and buy up pre-need companies at bargain basement prices.

However, the SEC, led by Chairman Lilia Bautista, has come out strongly against the move to transfer the pre-need industry from out of its jurisdiction. SEC Commissioner Jesus Enrique Martinez even issued a detailed five-page memorandum in which he argued that should be transfer push through it would be "a monstrosity in the making."