BusinessMirror January 12, 2015

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LOCAL SMALL ENTERPRISES ONLY GET about 10% OF FUNDING REQUIREMENTS FROM BANKS,WHILE THAIs GET 50%

PAPAL VISIT 2015

PHL SMEs still can’t rely on banks

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he difficulty to access financing is forcing Filipino small and medium enterprises (SMEs)— considered the backbone of the economy—to rely mostly on internally generated funds for their expansion and continued operations.

3 DAYS INSIDE

violence fuels debate among muslims over interpreting faith

In a working paper, titled “Why Do SMEs Not Borrow More from Banks? Evidence from the People’s Republic of China and Southeast Asia,” the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) said that over 70 percent of the funds used by SMEs in the Philippines were internally generated.

Further, the paper stated that less than 10 percent of these funds were financed by banks; less than 10 percent by supplier credit; and less than 5 percent by equity or stock sales.

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Perspective BusinessMirror

E4 Monday, January 12, 2015

Violence fuels debate among Muslims over interpreting faith

AERIAL view of Sargatmesh Mosque and school in the Sayeda Zeinab district of Cairo, Egypt. Amid violence like the attack in Paris on a satirical newspaper over its depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, there’s been increasing discussions among Muslims who say their community must reexamine their faith to modernize its interpretations and sideline extremists. AP/MOSA’AB EHSAMY

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B L K | The Associated Press

AIRO—After gunmen in Paris killed 12 people, Saudi Arabia’s top body of Muslim clerics quickly condemned the attack and said it could have no acceptable justification. It was a signal from some of the Islamic world’s strictest voices that cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were not a reason to kill the artists.

Only days later, Saudi Arabia sent an opposing message: On Friday a young Saudi was whipped 50 times in a public square in the city of Jiddah, the first of what will be 20 such weekly rounds of lashes.

That, along with 10 years in prison, is his sentence from the kingdom’s religious-based courts for insulting Islam, based on posts on his blog criticizing prominent clerics close to the monarchy.

The contradiction points to the difficulties at a time of a growing debate within Islam about whether and how to reject a radical minority that some fear is dragging them into conflict and wrecking the faith.

Western critics are increasingly brazen about suggesting there is something inherent in Islam that is sparking violence by some of its adherents. Most Muslims reject this, arguing that the tumult of the post-colonial Middle East has created fertile ground for radicalism among people whose faith is fundamentally one of peace.

Nonetheless, the past year has seen increasing voices among Muslims saying their community must reexamine their faith to modernize its interpretations and sideline extremists. As much as recent attacks in the West, the rise of startlingly vicious violence by Sunni

Muslim militants in the name of Islam against fellow Muslims, including Sunnis, brought it home for many Muslims that something must change in religious discourse.

In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State (IS) group has butchered entire families of Sunnis and beheaded Sunni soldiers, as well as Western hostages. In Pakistan a December 16 militant attack on a school that killed 150 people, mostly children, stunned the country.

It made many Pakistanis question any empathy they felt in the past toward militant groups—the attitude of “even if they’re wrong, they’re still fellow Muslims.”

“Now I hear more people talking openly against extremism and militancy,” said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, an independent political analyst in Pakistan.

When people ask “why Islam?”, much of the answer has little to do with the religion itself. The Arab world has seen decades of bloodshed and foreign intervention unlike any in any other region—long entrenched dictatorships, regime suppression, two Iraq wars, the Syrian civil war and Libya’s turmoil.

Those conflicts have stirred up hatreds—against the US, against the West, against Shiites and other communities—that rebound back into religion. Some youth angered by the conflicts find the answers in the version of “true Islam” touted by extremists like al-Qaeda and the IS group and promoted on the Internet. Those groups tell them Islam requires them to use violence to defend the faith, then provide whole networks to make it easy for them to do so.

Notably, Cherif Kouachi, one of the French brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo killings, appears to have been fi rst radicalized by hearing of abuses of Iraqi inmates by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison.

The attack on Charlie Hebdo prompted condemnations from across the Muslim world—and fueled voices in the West contending that Islam fuels violence.

Social-media feeds bristled that insults to other religions do not tend to spark murders.

That frustrates many Muslims who tire of apologizing for an extremist fringe they view as distorting their religion. Still, Muslims are also turning inward for change in the community.

The most prominent call came days before the attack, when Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah elSissi gave a speech to Muslim clerics saying interpretations developed over centuries have made the Muslim world a “source of worry, danger, killing and destruction in the whole world.” He called for a “religious revolution” to modernize the faith.

The Paris attack added a complication to the debate, because of the magazine’s extremely broad lampooning of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. Muslims who denounced the killings were often clearly discomfited by the content and defended their right to be upset over cartoons even some Western critics said crossed into racism.

In Egypt and Lebanon, political cartoonists published cartoons expressing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, with images of pens standing up to gunmen. On Twitter,

some pointed to Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim policeman of Algerian heritage killed by the attackers. “I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so,” was a tweet of solidarity circulating among Muslims.

“Obviously the act of terrorism is a far greater evil that the question of satirical comments,” Khalid Samad, a lawmaker from an Islamist political party in mostly Muslim Malaysia, said.

But some in the religious establishment struggled with the issue.

On pan-Arab satellite channel al-Arabiya Thursday night, an official from al-Azhar, the staterun Egyptian institution that is one of the most prestigious centers of Sunni Islam, said al-Azhar is working to modernize religious discourse, in part by interpreting texts in light of the context in place and time as opposed to literally.

“But we can’t exonerate the West for its insulting of the prophet. I’m not justifying what happened, but these are causes,” Sheikh Ashraf Saad said. “Just as we condemn extremists, we must also condemn these freedoms that have reached the point of insulting the prophet.”

He was countered by a Saudi journalist on the panel, Mshari alThaydi. “But the question is, why is it Muslims who get so angry and kill and blow things up? The French magazine insulted the pope, the Dalai Lama.... Why do we express our anger in this way?

“We have 1,436 years in the history of Islam,” he said. “Why do we hand ourselves over to a par-

ticular person who picks what he wants from that heritage and says that’s Islam and accept it or you’ve left the faith?”

That hits to the issue of who speaks for Islam, where in the Sunni branch in particular, individual clerics build on centuries of scholarship to argue what the faith requires.

Al-Qaeda and the IS group roughly take elements from two relatively modern strands. One is the writing of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood thinker Sayed Qutb, with its tenets that Muslim society has fallen from faith and violent jihad must be waged to bring “God’s rule.” The other is Wahhabism, a reform movement with a strict, literal and uncompromising interpretation of texts aimed at purging Islam of innovations. Wahhabism became the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia, which has promoted it around the Muslim world.

State religious institutions across the region, meanwhile, are widely criticized as stagnant. Government control has undermined their credibility among both liberal Muslims and militants. That was clear when Saudi Arabia’s top religious body, the Council of Senior Scholars, condemned the Paris attack and called it “unacceptable under any justification.”

That prompted a torrent of derision on Twitter from militant sympathizers who accused the clerics of doing the bidding of the US-allied Saudi monarchy and protecting those who insult Muhammad. “The masks fall and reveal those who lick the boots of dictators,” one proclaimed.

perspective

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for leaders, looking healthy matters more than looking smart BusinessMirror

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Ask Your Customers for PrediCtions, not PreferenCes

By Julie Wittes Schlack

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OMPAniES spend an enormous amount of time and dollars on market research, which all too often disappoints.

Purchase intent is notoriously overstated in survey responses, showing little correlation with actual sales. in contrast, when you ask a diverse group of people not “What are you going to do?” but rather, “What is going to happen?” the results tend to be far more accurate. That’s the phenomenon underlying the growing popularity of prediction markets, which are used to anticipate the likely success of an idea, product or political candidate. Prediction markets work similarly to the stock market. “investors” are given a bank of play money or points to invest in answers to questions. These may be binary questions like “Will this product appeal to 4to 6-year-old girls?” or multivariate questions such as “Which of these products will be most successful among 4- to 6-year-old girls?”

Players answer only the questions about which they have a strong opinion. They can invest in the likely failure of an idea, as well as its likely success. They can invest as few or as many points as they want, based on their confidence in their own predictions. When they invest, they explain why they’re doing it, providing some texture and qualitative insight behind the numbers.

Originally developed as an alternative to traditional political polling, this methodology has also generated credibility as a means for companies to tap their employees’ knowledge.

The results have been impressive. intel’s market for predicting product demand has been as much as 20 percent more accurate than official forecasts. Some of us at Communispace, a consumer collaboration agency, wondered whether consumers would be as engaged and accurate with prediction markets as employees.

Academic and industry research, and our own experience in more than 50 markets, suggest this level of engagement and accuracy indeed applies. in the five cases where our clients ran parallel studies comparing prediction market results to other forms of testing —such as traditional surveys with significantly larger sample sizes—prediction markets appear to generate the same outcomes with fewer respondents.

They also provide a far more nuanced read on consumers’ thinking and passions. They let us immediately see which concepts are polarizing, because they attract significant positive and negative investment.

We can also discern which ideas attract the greatest passion based on the number of investors and points they attract.

When comparing consumers’ predictions with real-world outcomes, the results are promising. in one case, for example, the question posed in the prediction markets was whether the new version of a company’s products would perform better than the prior year’s version. When our client compared the results to actual sales, they found that the consumer prediction markets correctly predicted outcomes for three out of the five products. The employee prediction markets were correct in all five cases.

An underappreciated benefit of prediction markets is that they can get customers genuinely excited about the business and its offerings.

The most visionary companies not only explore new research methodologies, but also engage their customers’ passion and expertise in the design and testing of the products and services they’ll eventually be asked to buy. if you do likewise, your business will benefit from customer-inspired growth. And that’s a prediction you can bank on.

Julie Wittes Schlack is the senior vice president of innovation at Communispace.

Monday, January 12, 2015 E 1

Matters More tHan Looking sMart

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By David Burkus

A study led by Brian Spisak at VU University of Amsterdam and published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience asked participants to judge leadership potential by looking at faces.

Why examine our reactions to faces? Because they lead us to make snap judgments about other people.

The researchers manipulated four simulated faces to make each “person” appear either more or less

healthy or intelligent, and showed pairs of these faces to 148 participants recruited online.

For each pair, participants were given one of four fictional company scenarios and asked to choose the new CEO of the company.

The scenarios outlined the CEO’s primary responsibility, such as engaging in an aggressive competition strategy or renegotiating a key partnership agreement with another company. in 69 percent of choices, participants favored more healthy-looking faces over less healthy-looking faces.

The tendency to choose healthy

The curious science of when multitasking works

By Walter Frick

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rying to do two things at once is usually a recipe for doing both badly, according to a long line of research. We’re slower and less accurate when we try to juggle two things. Experts came to believe that there wasn’t much that could be done about this, so most of the advice in Harvard Business Review has been to avoid multitasking as much as possible.

But if giving up multitasking isn’t an option, a new study published in in Psychological Science offers some hope: Our ability to multitask may depend on whether you were trained to do the two tasks separately or simultaneously.

The word multitasking is a misnomer. you’re not really doing two things at once so much as rapidly switching back and forth between them. That switching process is mentally taxing—your brain has to recall the instructions for how to do one task, then the other, and repeat the whole thing again. The result is poor performance on both. Cognitive

scientists at Brown University have now drawn a connection between multitasking and research on learning and memory.

Joo-Hyun Song and Patrick Bédard performed an experiment in which participants completed “visuomotor” exercises on a computermoving a stylus around on a screen based on visual prompts. Some participants were just moving the cursor in response to a series of dots.

Others were asked not only to perform that task and meanwhile follow a series of letters that appeared intermittently. in other words, the second group was asked to multitask. Later, the participants were asked to do the exercises again, except some of the single-taskers were asked to multitask and some multitaskers were asked to do just the single task. Surprisingly, the multitaskers didn’t do any worse this time around, on average, than those performing the single task.

What mattered was consistent context. Those who performed under the same conditions both times did better than those whose condi-

faces was dominant regardless of the scenario presented.

For organizations, the study suggests that a subtle bias may affect leadership succession planning and unnecessarily favor healthy individuals.

“A relatively healthy-looking leader may have a better chance of gaining sufficient levels of followership investment to initiate change,” according to the paper.

“On the other hand, a potential leader who looks relatively less healthy may be overlooked even if they are better suited for the job.”

For individuals, the implications

are even more straightforward: get healthy. Spisak said, “if you want to be chosen for a leadership position, looking intelligent is an optional extra” only applicable in certain contexts.

Looking healthy “appears to be important across a variety of situations.” So if you’re looking to get that promotion, your health matters just as much (if not more) than your experience and knowledge.

David Burkus is the author of The Myths of Creativity. He is founder of Leadership, Innovation & Strategy and assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University.

Things to stop doing in 2015

By Sarah Green & Gretchen Gavett

tions changed. So the multitaskers who started out doing two things at once were able to recall how to complete the task better than the multitaskers who were later asked to just do one thing, or the singletaskers who were later asked to do two. in a second experiment, the researchers found that it didn’t necessarily matter what the second task was. The second time around, multitaskers were asked to try a totally new task, along with a practiced one, and performed just as well.

These results suggest the possibility that our ability to juggle tasks and recall information depends on the context in which we learned those things in the first place. if you’re typing while listening to a conference call, maybe you’re less likely to make mistakes if you were equally distracted when you originally learned to type. The best advice is still to avoid multitasking whenever possible. But for those who have to do it, consistent context matters.

stop overdoing your strengths (lest they become weaknesses).And when it comes to evaluating others, stop mistaking confidence for competence.

Walter Frick is an associate editor at the Harvard Business Review.

as a “sandwich.”

stop multitasking (it can be done). stop procrastinating, saving work for

tomorrow and waiting to be inspired to work. At the same time, stop working at an unsustainable pace.

To do things better, you have to stop doing so much. if that’s not possible, at least stop complaining about how busy you are.

Everyone will thank you.

stop feeling like you have to be authentic all the time. it could be hold-

ing you back.

stop overlooking the women in your organization. And stop relying on diversity training programs to fix the problem. They can’t.

Speaking of things that don’t work:

stop ideating and brainstorming.

Stop trying to delight your customers all the time.

stop searching for a silver bullet to

your strategy dilemmas.

That said, stop using so many battle metaphors when you talk about strategy. And please, stop using terrible PowerPoints.

MONDAY MORNING stop being so positive—research shows it’s not all that helpful for achieving your goals.

stop giving negative feedback

stop sitting so much. Seriously.

stop getting defensive. (not that we’re

accusing you.) And if you can’t stop doing any of these things. stop believing that you have to be perfect.

Sarah Green is a senior associate editor at Harvard Business Review. Gretchen Gavett is an associate editor at the Harvard Business Review.

U.S.TO RETAKE HELM OF GLOBAL ECONOMY

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For Leaders, Looking HeaLtHy ew evidence suggests that healthy-looking individuals are perceived as better leaders, even over intelligent-looking people.

By Cai U. Ordinario

E1

he US is back on the driver’s seat of the global economy, after 15 years of watching China and emerging markets take the lead.

The world’s biggest economy will expand by 3.2 percent or more this year, its best performance since at least 2005, as an improving job market leads to stepped-up consumer spending, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank AG and BNP Paribas SA. That outcome would be about what each foresees for the world economy as a whole, and would be the first time since 1999 that America hasn’t lagged behind global growth, based on data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“The US is again the engine of global growth,” said Allen Sinai, CEO of Decision Economics in New York. “The economy is looking stellar, and is in its best shape since the 1990s.”

In the latest sign of America’s resurgence, the Labor Department reported on January 9

© 2013 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)

PESO exchange rates n US 45.0640

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A cutout of Pope Francis is surrounded by Filipino Army reservists and volunteers at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City during a briefing on Sunday, as part of security preparations for the pope’s visit. AP/Aaron Favila

Pope’s trip to Sri Lanka, PHL: 5 things to know

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ope Francis embarks on his second Asian pilgrimage this coming week, visiting Sri Lanka and the Philippines, exactly 20 years after Saint John Paul II’s record-making visit to two countries with wildly disparate Catholic populations.

Francis will make headlines of his own, drawing millions of faithful in the Philippines and treading uncharted political waters, following Sri Lanka’s remarkable electoral upset this past week.

New Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, who capitalized on former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s unpopularity among the island-nation’s ethnic and religious minorities, will be on hand to welcome Francis when he arrives in the capital, Co-

lombo, on Tuesday.

Francis will be bringing a message of reconciliation between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority and interfaith harmony, after Sri Lanka’s quarter-century civil war ended in 2009 with the army’s violent crushing of the Tamil Tiger rebels.

It isn’t known whether Francis will weigh in on Sri Lanka’s refusal to cooperate with a United Nations investigation into alleged war crimes in the final stages of the war. A 2011 UN report said up to 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians may have been killed during the offensive, and accused both sides of committing serious human-rights violations.

Here are five things to look forward to

during Francis’s five-day trip—two days in Sri Lanka and three in the Philippines.

Tamil travels

Significantly, Francis will travel to the Tamil region of northern Sri Lanka to pray at a Christian shrine and meet with the Tamil faithful. The Our Lady of Madhu shrine is revered by both Sinhalese and Tamil Catholics, providing the perfect backdrop for the pope to encourage reconciliation in a part of Sri Lanka that was devastated by the war.

“It’s a very strong gesture,” said Rev. Bernardo Cervellera, whose Vatican-affiliated missionary news agency AsiaNews covers Continued from A3

n japan 0.3766 n UK 67.9926 n HK 5.8110 n CHINA 7.2514 n singapore 33.7305 n australia 36.6225 n EU 53.1485 n SAUDI arabia 12.0059 Source: BSP (09 January 2015)

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Monday, January 12, 2015

A2

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Philippine SMEs still U.S. TO RETAKE HELM OF GLOBAL ECONOMY can’t rely on banks Continued from A12

Continued from A1

“SMEs in our sample-countries remain dependent on internal funds, implying that financial access of SMEs in developing Asia is more challenging. This is largely due to a lower level of capitalmarket development, underdeveloped SME financing institutions, and, perhaps, a greater problem of asymmetric information between SME lenders and borrowers,” the paper stated.

The paper estimated that over 90 percent of SME funding in Pakistan and Myanmar was internally generated. Thai SMEs only derive about 30 percent of their funding needs from company coffers.

Thai SMEs resort to bank financing, which accounts for slightly above 50 percent of their funding requirements. The Philippines and Malaysia make use of the most amount of supplier credit in developing Asia, while the least was used by Pakistan and Vietnam.

Further, SMEs in Nepal and Thailand sourced over 10 percent of their financing needs through equity or stock sales, while the least amount was recorded in Pakistan and India.

“The framework and implementation of government policies regarding collaterals and credit guarantees can be important to SME finance in developing Asia,” the paper stated.

“As for the role of venture-capital funding for SME finance in developing Asia, it is relatively nonexistent at present, and more exploration is required on its implementa-

tion and effectiveness. Japan has developed hometown investment trust funds and better credit-risk databases for SMEs, which could potentially be applicable to SME finance in developing Asian economies,” it added.

The paper cited data from the International Finance Corp. (IFC) Enterprise Finance Gap Database in 2011 that showed that the financing gap in developing Asia was at around $162.4 billion.

In the Philippines SMEs financing gap was estimated at around $2 billion, or around P88 billion. This represents an average financing gap per SME of around $59,000, or P2.6 million.

The largest recorded financing gap for SMEs in developing Asia was in China, at $62.7 billion. This, however, only represents an average financing gap per SME of $44,000.

The lowest financing gap recorded in the region was in Sri Lanka, at $100 million, or an average of $29,000 financing gap per SME. The highest average financing gap per SME was recorded in Singapore, at $856,000. However, the total financing gap in the city-state was $7.1 billion.

The study was authored by ADBI Research Director Ganeshan Wignaraja and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand associate professor Yothin Jinjarak.

The Tokyo-based ADBI was established in 1997 to help build capacity, skills and knowledge related to poverty reduction and other areas that support long-term growth and competitiveness in developing economies in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We are still waiting to see the kind of strengthening of wage numbers we would expect to be consistent with what we are seeing elsewhere in terms of growth and the absolute jobs numbers,” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart said in a January 9 interview.

Breaking away

The US is breaking away from the rest of the world partly because it has had more success working off the debt-driven excesses that helped precipitate the worst recession since the Great Depression.

“The progress has been far greater in the US,” Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School in New York and a former chief White House economist, told the American Economic Association annual conference in Boston on January 3.

Delinquencies on consumer installment loans fell to a record-low 1.51 percent in the third quarter, the American Bankers Association said on January 8. That’s “well under” the 15-year average of 2.3 percent on such loans, which include credit cards and borrowing for car purchases and home improvements, it said.

US households have benefited from the strengthening job market and the collapse in oil prices. The nationwide average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline was $2.17 on January 8, the cheapest since May 2009, according to figures from motoring group AAA.

Wage gains

While wage gains have lagged—average hourly earnings fell 0.2 percent last month from November—they will accelerate as the labor market continues to tighten, according to Mohamed El-Erian, a Bloomberg View columnist and an adviser to Munich-based Allianz SE. “It’s just a matter of time before wage growth

3-DAY EXTENDED FORECAST JANUARY 12, 2015 | MONDAY

TODAY’S WEATHER

Northeast Monsoon locally known as “Amihan”. It affects the eastern portions of the country. It is cold and dry; characterized by widespread cloudiness with rain showers.

Consumer spending

At $11.5 trillion in 2013, US personal-consumption expenditures were larger than the gross domestic product of any other country that year, including China, according to statistics from the IMF Fund in Washington. The figures aren’t adjusted to reflect price discrepancies for the same goods in different nations—so-called purchasing power parity—which tends to inflate the output of developing nations where consumers pay less for everything, from haircuts to coffee.

Deutsche Bank economists, led by David Folkerts-Landau in London, forecast US GDP will expand 3.7 percent this year, after climbing 2.5 percent in 2014. The US will contribute close to 18 percent to global growth of 3.6 percent in 2015, compared with 7 percent for all other industrial countries combined, they wrote in a January 9 report.

While the US is gathering strength, the Bric nations—Brazil, Russia, India and China—are facing tougher times after spending much of the past 15 years basking in the attention of global investors.

Brazil’s debt was downgraded last year for

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Partly cloudy to at times cloudy with rainshowers Light rains

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PHILIPPINE AREA OF RESPONSIBILITY (PAR)

The US has pulled ahead of other industrial nations partly because its policy-making has been better, according to Paul Mortimer-Lee, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and his colleagues are still weighing whether they should buy government bonds to fight off the danger of deflation—a step that the Federal Reserve first took back in 2009.

US budget policy also has been more effective than the euro region’s austerity strategy, which undercut the continent’s economy, MortimerLee added. Bloomberg News

NORTHEAST MONSOON AFFECTING LUZON. (AS OF JANUARY 11, 5:00 PM)

LAOAG CITY 19 – 29°C

PUERTO PRINCESA CITY 23 – 30°C

Policies superior

Brics faltering

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the first time in a decade, while Russia is heading into recession, its economy pummeled by the collapse of oil prices and US and European sanctions. Growth in China and India has slowed as both countries grapple with revamping their economies.

“Close the book on emerging markets driving global growth,” Nancy Lazar, cofounder and a partner at Cornerstone Macro Lp. in New York, wrote in a January 8 report to clients.

Even Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chief economist who coined the Bric acronym, has soured on some of its members, saying in an e-mail that he would be tempted to remove Brazil and Russia from the group if they fail to revive their flagging economies.

“It is tough for the Bric countries to all repeat their remarkable growth rates” of the first decade of this century, said O’Neill, a Bloomberg View columnist and former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management International.

He argued, though, that even at a slower growth rate, China will add more to the world economy this year than the US, when measuring their output on a purchasing-power parity basis.

picks up,” he told Bloomberg Television’s In The Loop program on January 9.

Spending is already strengthening. Households splurged on new cars, appliances, televisions and clothing, as spending climbed 0.6 percent in November, double the gain in October, according to figures from the Commerce Department in Washington. Light-vehicle sales totaled 16.5 million in 2014, the most since 2006.

“The economy picked up a nice tailwind at the end of the year,” Bill Fay, group vice president for Toyota Motor Corp.’s US sales arm, said on a January 5 conference call. “This strength will carry the auto industry to a sixth straight year of growth in 2015, with analyst projections ranging as high as 17 million.”

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Editor: Dionisio L. Pelayo • Monday, January 12, 2015 A3

Pope’s trip to Sri Lanka, Five more NBP inmates PHL: 5 things to know transferred to the NBI ...

continued from a1

the Catholic Church in Asia closely.

“He is going to this area where John Paul couldn’t go because of the war.”

The Catholic Church considers itself uniquely poised to be a force for unity in Sri Lanka because it counts both Sinhalese and Tamils as members. They worship together, with liturgies often alternating between the two languages, said the Rev. Prasad Harshan, a Sri Lankan doctoral student at Rome’s Pontifical Holy Cross University.

“He’s making an extra effort to go to these areas, and to see these victims,” he said. “That will be a wonderful sign of solidarity.”

Francis’s canonization on Wednesday of Sri Lanka’s first saint, the Rev. Giuseppe Vaz, is another sign of unity. The 17th-century missionary is credited with having revived the Catholic faith in the country amid persecution by Dutch colonial rulers, ministering to both Sinhalese and Tamil faithful.

Buddhist fundamentalism

When John Paul visited Sri Lanka in 1995, he, too, tried to bring a message of tolerance, but was met with a boycott by the island nation’s Buddhist leaders, who constitute 70 percent of the population. (Hindus represent some 13 percent, Muslims 10 percent and Catholics about 7 percent, according to Vatican figures).

Buddhist representatives had been expected to attend an interfaith meeting, but none showed up to protest John Paul’s criticism of the Buddhist doctrine of salvation.

Buddhist fundamentalism has only grown in the ensuing 20 years, with hard-line Buddhists waging a violent campaign against Muslims.

But two moderate Buddhist representatives are scheduled to greet Francis during an interfaith meeting on the first day of his visit.

“I don’t know if during other occasions or places there might be discordant voices from fundamentalists,” said the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi.

“We’ll have to see.”

Francis has denounced the rise of religious fundamentalism in Sri Lanka and the extremists who promote a “false sense of national unity based on a single religious identity.”

During a meeting with visiting Sri Lankan bishops last May, Francis said the local church must continue to seek “partners in peace and interlocutors in dialogue” despite violence and intimidation from religious extremists.

Security concerns

AS with any papal trip, security will be tight in both Sri Lanka and the Philippines, even for a pope who relishes plunging into crowds and driving around in open-topped cars rather thanbulletproofpopemobiles.

But the concerns on the Philippine leg of the trip are not without merit, given current tensions with Islam and the rather checkered history of papal visits to Asia’s largest Roman Catholic country.

When Pope Paul VI arrived in Manila in 1970 for the first-ever papal visit, he was immediately rushed by a would-be assassin dressed as a priest who stabbed him in the gut and neck. The wounds were superficial and the attacker wrestled to the ground, but blood was drawn.

This past October, the two blood-stained vests Paul wore that day were selected as the relics used during his Vatican beatification ceremony.

A week before Saint John Paul II visited the Philippines in January 1995, Filipino authorities said they discovered a plot by Muslim extremists to kill the pontiff after they were led by an accidental fire to a terrorist hideout in a Manila apartment building, where they

found bomb-making chemicals, his picture, maps showing routes where he would pass and a tailor’s receipt for a priest cassock.

Authorities later blamed the plot on Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Crowd control

That said, John Paul’s 1995 visit was perhaps more noteworthy for having set a papal milestone that no pope has since met: An estimated 5 million people turned out for John Paul’s final Mass, filling Manila’s Rizal Park and spreading out for miles in every direction.

The boulevards were so jammed that John Paul was forced to arrive at the Mass by helicopter—over an hour late—because his motorcade simply couldn’t reach the altar.

The Philippines, with a population of 100 million, is about 81 percent Catholic.

The Rev. Gregory Gaston, rector of the Pontifical Filipino College, said he expected that the wildly popular Francis might surpass John Paul’s record, noting that local leaders have given workers time off so they can attend his key events, which include a Mass on January 18 in the same Rizal Park as John Paul’s historic finale.

“Now the concern isn’t from terrorists, but from the people—because the people love the pope so much, there’s the chance they might mob him!” Gaston said, laughing.

Environment

Francis is expected to focus his remarks in the Philippines on issues related to families: Each day he’ll meet with families young and old, including ones separated by members who have left home to find work overseas. But another issue he’s expected to raise, at least fleetingly, is the environment.

Filipino bishops have made environmental concerns a top priority, and Francis will visit survivors of Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan), which the government has held up as an example of the extreme weather patterns that may be the result of climate change.

Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said Francis doesn’t have a dedicated speech to the environment, but that “we can expect some references.”

Ever since he was installed as the first pope named for the natureloving Saint Francis of Assisi, Francis has called for greater attention to caring for God’s creation.

Speculation has been mounting about how far Francis will take that call in his forthcoming encyclical on ecology: Environmentalists hope that the document, expected sometime this spring, will help jumpstart stalled international efforts to curb climate change.

But those who reject scientific findings that climate change is manmade are already condemning the pope for taking up the issue at all.

Maureen Mullarkey of First Things, a conservative US Catholic journal, wrote in a recent blog post that Francis is “imprudent” and “sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.”

No drones or unmanned aerial vehicle are allowed to operate in designated places during Pope Francis’s apostolic visit, which starts on January 15 and ends on January 19.

The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (Caap) made this warning on Sunday, saying violators will face severe penalty if caught going against the agency’s “no-drone policy.”

“Violators will be fined between

P300,000 and P500,000 per apprehension,” the Caap said.

The country’s aviation regulator issued a “notice to airmen”, saying Asian utility vehicles (AUV’s) are banned from January 15 to 19 in places the Pope intends to visit while in country.

The Caap earlier declared a “no-fly zone” in certain areas, from a 3-nautical-mile radius from surface up to 18,000 feet altitude, where the pope will hold visits and official activities.

Caap Deputy Director General for Operations Rodante Joya is urging the public to report any unauthorized operations of drones to Operation Rescue and Coordinating Center of the agency through its hot lines, 028799110 or 0917-8607245.

The Caap is now preparing the rules to govern the use of AUVs or drones, Joya said.

In deference to the Holy Father, health advocates on Sunday appealed to smokers not to light up during public events from January 15 to 19, when Pope Francis is visiting the country.

“We are appealing to all smokers not to light up during any of these public events in deference to the Holy Father and in consideration of the massive crowd that include children, who may be exposed to secondhand smoke,” Emer Rojas, New Vois of the Philippines president, said.

“Secondhand smoke is as dangerous as smoking itself. The International Agency on Cancer Research classifies secondhand smoke as a carcinogen, which means even if you are not smoking but are exposed to tobacco smoke, you are also at risk of cancer,” Rojas said.

The World Health Organization estimates that half of all Filipino women and children are regularly exposed to secondhand smoke in homes and in public areas. Many women develop cancer not because they smoke but because they live with smokers.

Tobacco use kills an estimated 6 million people around the world annually, while around 600,000 die of secondhand smoke. Smoking is the most preventable risk factor for cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and stroke.

In the Philippines 10 Filipinos die every hour, or a total of 87,000 every year, due to smoking. An estimated 17.3 million Filipino adults smoke and consume about 1,073 sticks of cigarettes a year, the highest tobacco use in Southeast Asia.

Aquino Cabinet officials did a “walk-through” exercise at Malacañang grounds on Sunday to simulate and avert potential kinks when Pope Francis tours the Palace with President Aquino on January 16.

Communications Secretary Herminio B. Coloma Jr. disclosed that security officials are also set to conduct on Monday a “simulation” of the trip the Papal convoy will take on a route from Villamor Air Base to the papal Nunciature on Taft Avenue, Manila, upon his arrival on January 15.

He added that an “assorted motorcade” will, likewise, simulate the convoy’s route to other venues of major events the pope is scheduled to attend during his five-day visit to the Philippines.

The secretary said the Palace will be issuing advisories to motorists and other commuters planning to pass through streets affected by the dry run to use alternative routes to avoid being inconvenienced.

Coloma declined to provide even a ballpark figure on how much the government had allocated for hosting the papal visit.

“No estimates yet, we are still gathering data from concerned agencies,” Coloma told the BusinessMirror. If ever, he hinted it would be comparable to previous State visits.

AP, Claudeth Mocon-Ciriaco, Recto Mercene and Butch Fernandez

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OVERNMENT authorities continued their crackdown against contrabands and other illegal activities inside the New Bilibid Prison (NBP) that resulted in the seizure of illegal drugs and other prohibited items.

Operatives from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and local police raided the national penitentiary last Saturday that yielded sachets of illegal drugs, bladed items, cell phones, sex toys and P0.7 million in cash.

The raid, conducted at around 6:30 a.m., covered Buildings 4, 5 and 8 of the NBP compound. Justice Secretary Leila de Lima inspected the seized items in the afternoon.

Earlier raids of government authorities also yielded illegal items and exposed the luxurious lifestyle some high-profile inmates are enjoying inside the NBP. Following the raid, de Lima has ordered the transfer of five convicted drug lords to the NBI headquarters in Manila from their detention cells at NBP.

De Lima identified the drug convicts as Joselito Valiente, Brando Ramirez, Gianfranco Pasco, Engelbert Durano and Noel Arnejo.

The Department of Justice chief revealed the raid initially targetted Pasco, Durano and Arnejo.

“But in the course of the operations, Valiente and Ramirez were also found in the two other kubol [shed] raided supposedly belonging to Pasco and Durano. There where very incriminating evidence [notebooks and pieces of papers containing data like amounts and grams] of what are obviously drug transactions,” she told reporters.

Valiente is reportedly a former bigtime drug lord connected with the Batang Cebu gang.

The five inmates have joined the 19 inmates who were earlier transferred to the NBI.

Those transferred to the NBI following the first raid at NBP last December 15 were Noel Martinez, Michael Ong, Willy Sy, Peter Co, Eugene Chua, Chua Sam Li, Vincent Sy, George Sy, Joel Capones, Herbert Colangco, Amin Imam Boratong, Clarence Dongail, Tom Chua, Rommel Capoines, Jojo Baligad, Jacky King Sy, Willy Chua, Jacky King Sy and Herman Agojo.

Seized from them were illegal drugs, cash, firearms and other contrabands.

De Lima said the five inmates would also be barred from seeing their families or legal counsels.

Boratong, Ong, Sy, Martinez and Co have all questioned their transfer in separate writ of habeas corpus petitions before the Supreme Court, Court ofAppealsandtheRegionalTrialCourt in Manila.

According to de Lima, there was nothing illegal with the transfer of the inmates, explaining their detention center is an extension facility of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor).

“Their temporary transfer to the NBI for safekeeping is in line with plenary safekeeping mandate of BuCor subject only to their right to humane treatment or constitutional right of prisoners against cruel and degrading punishment,” she added. Joel R. San Juan

Economy

A4 Monday, January 12, 2015 • Editors: Vittorio V. Vitug and Max V. de Leon

BusinessMirror

news@businessmirror.com.ph

Higher subsidies given to GOCCs in 2014

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By David Cagahastian

overnment subsidies to government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs) amounted to P66.323 billion as of November 2014, already almost the same amount given for the full year of 2013.

In November last year total subsidies to GOCCs amounted to P2.69 billion, or an 88-percent increase from the total subsidies granted in October.

The total government subsidies as of November is only P6 million short of the total subsidies granted by the government for the full year of 2013, which amounted to P66.329 billion.

The top recipients of government subsidies in November are the National Electrification Administration (NEA) (P768 million);

National Home Mortgage Finance Corp. (P500 million); Social Security System (SSS) (P333 million); Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) (P259 million); Local Water Utilities Administration (P159 million); Social Housing Finance Corp. (P156 million); and Tourism Promotion Board (P125 million).

To date, the GOCCs that have received the biggest shares in the government subsidies are the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (P35.31 billion); National Housing Author-

ity (P9 billion); NEA (P5 billion); National Food Authority (P4.25 billion); Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (P2.79 billion); and the PCA (P1.73 billion).

Other GOCCs that received big subsidies this year are the Philippine Postal Corp. (P968 million); Social Housing Finance Corp. (P799 million); SSS (P772 million); National Power Corp. (P591 million); National Irrigation Administration (P557 million); and the Philippine Rice Research Institute (P501 million).

UV Express operators buck fare reduction

By Lorenz S. Marasigan

T

he petition to cut fares for land-transportation services was met with strong opposition from operators of closed vans, who cited bleeding bottom lines dragged by capitalintensive investments.

Coalition of Drivers and Operators of UV Express President Rosalino Marable said his camp’s opposition to the proposed fare reduction is driven by the operators’ need to “recover” investments that were made several years ago.

“We are losing profit because of these regulations. Our acquisition cost before was at P300,000 to P400,000, today it’s P1.4 million. Because of these regulations, commuter price index, cost of spare parts and consumer goods are also high,” he said. “We need to recover from our investments.”

The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) heard on Friday the petition of Rep. Manuel M. Iway of the First District of Negros Oriental, who sought for a nationwide reduction in fares for taxis, shuttle services and public-utility buses following the rollbacks in diesel prices.

LTFRB Chairman Winston M.

Ginez said the petition needs to be studied further, hence, he ordered all regional directors to conduct public hearings on the proposal to solicit information from other operators around the country.

The next hearing for the case was set for January 16, while the decision of the agency should come out

by January 23.

Iway filed the petition last December 17, seeking the reduction of fares for other land-transportation services, after the LTFRB granted his call to reduce jeepney fares in Metro Manila by a peso.

“Cost of fuel today is much more cheaper. Before the diesel was about P47.75 and the flagdown of taxis was at P40. But today, fuel is only at P28. They should be generous to the passengers. When fuel price increased, they are eager to file for a fare increase. So in our present case, they should also deduct fare prices for the passengers,” the lawmaker said.

“I also want these deductions for taxis and buses to have a domino effect, as basic commodities will also decrease its cost,” he added.

Iway asked the regulator to reduce the flagdown fare for taxis from the existing P40 to P30, and from the current P3.50 to P2.50 for

POPE IN MALLS Filipinos’ excitement for the visit of Pope Francis is evident even in malls, where his life-size images are displayed like the one shown

above. Nonie Reyes

every succeeding 300 meters.

His petition for the reduction of bus fares only involved ordinary buses. Iway said he will “refine it because of the failure in publishing the supplemental reading, which

includes provincial routes and aircon buses.”

The petition was based on the continuous decline in the price of diesel, which has been dropping since December, as the Organization of

the Petroleum Exporting Countries decided to maintain current production levels despite a glut in the market with an estimated oversupply of 1.5 million to 2 million barrels daily.

With Jae Denise Adolfo

DENR to launch P500-M National Forest Protection Program

By Jonathan L. Mayuga

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he Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) will soon embark on a P500-million national program to strengthen the protection of the country’s natural forests.

The National Forest Protection Program aims to strengthen protection mechanism of the country’s remaining natural forests, DENRForest Management Bureau (FMB) Director Ricardo Calderon said.

Environment Secretary Ramon J.P. Paje, according to Calderon, was able to get the approval of the Depart-

ment of Budget and Management (DBM) for the program’s funding.

“The National Forest Protection Program will complement the NGP [National Greening Program] by strengthening forest protection. Under the NGP, we are expanding our forest cover. Under the forest-protection program, we will strengthen mechanism to protect our forest,” Calderon, also the national coordinator of the NGP, told the BusinessMirror.

Of the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares, more than half, or 15 million hectares, are classified as forest land. However, only around

6.8 million of these forest lands are actually covered with forests.

The NGP, which aims to plant 1.5 billion trees in 1.5 million hectares of land, seeks to increase the country’s forest cover by 12 percent by 2016.

Under the forest-protection program to be launched by the DENR, the 31 remaining illegal-logging hot spots will be eliminated, Calderon said.

He said the program will also cover the 240 protected areas (PAs) across the country. The 240 PAs cover more than 5 million hectares of forests, watershed and natural parks under the National Integrated

Protected Areas Act. “We are closely coordinating with the Biodiversity Management Bureau [BMB] in the implementation of the forest-protection program,” Calderon said.

Aside from protecting and conserving the country’s rich biological diversity, the BMB is mandated to oversee the management of the country’s PAs. Calderon said part of the activities under the forest-protection program will be to intensify the information, education and communication campaign, particularly in the identified illegal-logging hot spots, and to tap

communities as protectors of the country’s forests.

Calderon said the DENR chief has also instructed the FMB to come up with a proposal to effectively track down trees being targeted by illegal loggers.

He said one of the proposals is to embed premium trees with microchips that will emit low-frequency radio signal. This way, he said, even in checkpoints, the anti-illegal logging task force can easily detect if the logs being transported are illegally cut from natural forest, which has been banned by the government under Executive Order 23 since 2011.

PCCI hits BOC policy on loading of export goods

By Catherine N. Pillas

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he Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI), the country’s largest business organization, is opposing the Bureau of Customs’s (BOC) policy requiring Customs personnel to be present during loading schedules of exporters.

The PCCI said the policy is an impediment to trade facilitation, and could further increase the cost of doing business for exporters.

“There are not enough Customs’s personnel to certify every loading nationwide,” PCCI President Alfredo M. Yao said.

“The shortage of Customs staff is a reason for the mandatory x-ray inspection and for the Customs’s prerogative to open containers on suspicion of misdeclarations.”

Yao said the PCCI appreciates the intent of the stuffing policy, which aims to establish the legitimacy of exporters as part of the risk-management system being developed for exports, but noted the need to further study the implementation procedure to ensure that it will support the objectives of trade facilitation and export competitiveness, especially of small and medium enterprises. “ L et ’s he lp ou r sm a l l a nd medium exporters compete,” Yao said. “Their competitors in Asean countries don’t have that policy.

Our exporters pay for additional costs of the transport, accommodations and meals of Customs staff.”

“The other question is if personnel are available, and if they are available at nighttime, holidays and weekends,” Yao said.

“Small ex porters have not factored in the costs of this new Customs policy in their export contracts,” he said. “The costs of this new policy are not in quotations negotiated six or nine months before.”

The cost of waiting include additional rent for the use of warehouses while waiting for the BOC staff, plus extra charges for trucks.

For heavier items, such as furniture and marble tiles, stuffing of a container to be witnessed by a Customs staff can take about five days.

“This BOC policy exposes our exporters to penalties of as much as 10 percent on the first day of delayed shipments,” he said. “Worse, our exporters lose the next sale because buyers prefer to order from reliable suppliers.”

The port congestion at the ports in Manila, which has yet to subside, also increases the risks of delays, he added.

DOT intensifies promo drive in US

By Recto Mercene

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BCDA, AL-AHLI FORGE ALLIANCE

Mohammed Khammas (right), CEO of Al-Ahli Holding Group, and Arnel Paciano Casanova, president and CEO of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA), announce their long-term strategic alliance for the promotion and development of Filipino products and services in the Middle East. ROY DOMINGO

scape the harsh winter, go to the Philippines!

This is the Department of Tourism’s (DOT) advice to Filipinos in major cities in the East Coast, urging them to make a tropical getaway to their home country during the subfreezing temperatures and arctic blasts in large parts of the United States.

For the past several weeks, double-decker hopon, hop-off tour buses wrapped with photographs of popular tourist destinations in the Philippines, such as Bohol, Boracay and Camarines Sur, could be seen moving around Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia and Miami.

The Philippine Embassy said the campaign is part of the tourism department’s efforts to promote 2015 as “Visit the Philippines Year.”

“This harsh weather presents the perfect opportunity for Americans to travel to the Philippines and experience the beauty and warmth the country has to offer,” Ambassador Jose L. Cuisia Jr. said. “Our American friends will also find it easier to head off to Manila

when Philippine Airlines starts its regular flights from New York in March.”

Cuisia said the bus wraps that showcase warm Philippine beaches will definitely catch the attention of Americans who are experiencing one of the coldest winters in recent history.

Josh Levee, general manager of City Sights, the bus tour company carrying the Philippine tourism ads, agrees with Cuisia. “In this weather, it is definitely enticing. I want to go!” he said.

Vector Media’s Jordan Perlmutter said tens of thousands of people see the Philippine tourism ads wrapped around City Sights double-decker buses at New York’s Times Square; Washington’s Jefferson Memorial; Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell; and Miami’s South Beach, among others.

“Double-decker bus wraps are iconic media forms and are the largest ads roaming the country,” said Perlmutter, whose company undertook the tourism-promotion campaign in cooperation with 360i, a New York-based advertising company.

Economy BusinessMirror

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E-jeep maker to deploy 1,000 units by end-2015

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By Lorenz S. Marasigan

HE sole manufacturer of electric jeepneys (e-jeep) in the Philippines sees a bright prospect in the local land-transportation sector as reflected by its aim of deploying 1,000 e-jeep units nationwide by year-end, its chief executive said.

Global Electric Transport Services Ltd. President Sigfrido Tiñga said his company is confident that jeepney operators will soon choose to shift to his firm’s environment-friendly units from dieselpowered vehicles.

“We hope to have 1,000 units on the road before year-end,” he said in an interview. “We expect that over time, we will not only deploy sample units, but operators will see the prospect of converting their units to e-jeeps.”

At present, transport group Pangkalahatang Sangguniang Metro Manila and Suburbs Association (Pasang Masda), whose application for franchise to operate 13 units of e-jeeps along SM North Edsa to Katipunan in Quezon City, expressed its

optimism in the new technology.

Tiñga said his company is also negotiating with other operators to service routes involving major malls in the cities of Quezon, Makati and Pasay, such as Fisher Mall, Eastwood, Gateway, SM Makati, SM Mall of Asia, and SM Novaliches, among others.

The new transport mode, known as City Optimized Managed Electric Transport (Comet), will also be introduced in Cebu. “We’re not coming to replace the operators. We’re here to convert them to use e-jeeps. One Comet costs over a million pesos, but we have financing programs to help them fund the acquisition cost,” he said.

Fare rates of the e-jeeps will be based on jeepney rates; hence, a 4-kilometer ride on an e-jeep will also cost P7.50.

The e-jeepsareequippedwithmodernfeatures including cashless payment system using reloadable cards, fixed stops, Global Positioning System, provision of Internet connectivity, side entrance for easier boarding, and closed-circuit television cameras to enhance passenger safety, among others.

Monday, January 12, 2015 A5

Manila, Santiago set to hold FTA talks

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hile is keen on forging a freetrade agreement (FTA) with the Philippines, the chief of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) said, with informal talks with the South American country slated to begin this March.

Trade Secretary Gregory L. Domingo told reporters in an interview on Friday that in a recent meeting with Chilean Ambassador to the Philippines Roberto Mayorga, it was aired that the South American country is eyeing to pursue a bilateral FTA with the Philippines.

“They’re one of the most prolific

when it comes to signing FTAs, so we are going to be part of that. There will be an incoming mission this March; we’ll have informal talks then,” Domingo said.

To reciprocate, the trade office will also be organizing a mission to South America in the middle of the year, aiming to also visit Peru, Brazil

and Mexico during the same mission. If the initial informal talks in March hold promise, Domingo said further discussions will be pursued in the follow-up visit.

Domingo said they still have to flesh out the definite benefits of a possible FTA with Chile when the Chilean mission arrives in March, but noted that wine is among the chief imports of the Philippines from the South American nation.

Meanwhile, a business mission from the United States is bound to arrive on January 29, a ripe opportunity to move the trade department’s proposal for the duty-free access of goods to the US from Supertyphoon Yolanda-stricken areas.

The proposal has been on hold pending the mid-term elections in the US and the subsequent formation of committees in Congress.

But on the occasion of the mission of the US-Philippines Society, which will include Ambassador of the Philippines to the United States Jose L. Cuisia, the plan can once again be put forward, Domingo said.

“Now that US Congress is about to convene and the committees are being formed, we will bring that up as one of the items we want to push when the US delegation arrives at the end of this month. So toward middle of first quarter, we will be in full force of trying to get sponsors of the bill,” Domingo said.

The proposal is aimed at spurring economic activity in Yolanda-hit areas, as the duty-free access will attract manufacturers to set up in the affected areas to generate employment for the communities there.

Catherine N. Pillas

GBPC to provide Meralco additional capacity

By Lenie Lectura

T

BONIFACIO RISING Skyscrapers continue to rise in Fort Bonifacio in Taguig, as the area is fast becoming the preferred hub of business-process outsourcing companies and multinational firms. The Fort Bonifacio business district, which used to house military facilities, have been seeing rapid development, rivaling the nearby Makati Central Business District. NONIE REYES

CIAC lobbies for P1.2-B terminal at Clark airport

By Joey Pavia Correspondent

A

NGELES CITY—Clark International Airport Corp. (CIAC) President and CEO Emigdio Tanjuatco III disclosed over the weekend that he is lobbying for the immediate construction of the P1.2-billion Low Cost Carrier Passenger Terminal Building (LCC-PTB) at the Clark International Airport (CIA).

Tanjuatco said he asked National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) Director General Arsenio M. Balisacan during their meeting on January 5 to approve the plan for the LCC-PTB to pave the way for the bidding of the terminal “at least by March this year.” He added that the approval of the Neda is needed before the bidding process could start.

Tanjuatco was interviewed shortly after his meeting with Pinoy Gumising Ka Movement (PGKM) Chairman Ruperto “Perto” Cruz at the latter’s residence here. The PGKM is pushing for the full development of the CIA for some 20 years.

Tanjuatco said the P1.2-billion funding for the LCC-PTB “is at the GAA [General Appropriations Act] and we must capitalize on this.” He added that “if the bidding pushes through in March, then the construction of the terminal will hopefully start by June.”

Cruz warned Tanjuatco that not just the PGKM but thousands of residents of North and Central Luzon will hold “wide protest actions” against the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) should its secretary, Joseph Emilio “Jun” Abaya, derail the construction of the LCC-PTB and other planned development for the CIA. Cruz lambasted Abaya for pushing the proposed Sangley International

Airport in Cavite.

Cruz said Sangley is only for Cavite, where Abaya used to be congressman of the province’s First District for three terms.

Cruz also assailed Abaya, who expressed surprise by the study made by the Aeroports de Paris.

“Aeroports de Paris designed a huge terminal that is beyond what we thought would be the actual demand. We don’t need it yet,” Abaya said in earlier published reports. The DOTC tapped the Aeroports de Paris for the feasibility study not only of the terminal but also other facilities at the Clark aviation complex.

Cruz said the “potential of Clark airport is its land area and ready infrastructure.” He added: “Why is the design study of Aeroports de Paris too big when we are thinking of not only the present demand but future development?”

Cruz said that residents of North and Central Luzon, about 25 million, are pinning their hopes on the Clark airport. He added that “it was said many times that most of the country’s overseas Filipino workers are from the our regions.”

“Sangley is too close to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport [Naia] in terms of air distance. It is not feasible to put up an airport there without compromising Naia. It would be better to put up an airport at the Fernando Air Base in Lipa City, Batangas, which could operate with Naia and Clark simultaneously,” Cruz said.

In a statement issued by the DOTC on January 8, Tanjuatco assured the public that the CIAC, as well as the DOTC, are pushing for the development of the CIA in Pampanga.

Abaya also clarified that while the proposed Sangley International Airport is still under study, the government is focused on the aggressive development of both Naia and Clark.

Oil companies reduce prices again today

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IL firms on Monday reduced fuel prices, the second time for the year.

A P1.70-per-liter cut in gasoline, P1.60-per-liter reduction in kerosene, and a P1.50-per-liter rollback in diesel were implemented beginning January 12.

The movement reflects what has been happening in the international oil market. These reflects the continued softening in the prices of petroleum products in the world market, the oil firms said.

Among those that announced the price reduction were Petron Corp., Pilipinas Shell, Phoenix Petroleum, PTT Philippines and Seaoil. Other oil firms are expected to follow suit.

Last week oil firms cut prices

by P0.95 per liter for gasoline and P0.80 per liter for diesel as world oil prices picked off from last year’s downward spiral. Analysts attributed the drop, which saw oil prices to a five-year low, to growing supply in the US, weak global demand, and Middle East nations’ move not to cut production.

Global oil prices have been falling due to the decision of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to maintain current production levels despite a glut in the market with an estimated oversupply of 1.5 million to 2 million barrels daily. Lenie Lectura

HE Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) will source additional capacity from interim bilateralsupply agreements with the units of Global Business Power Corp. (GBPC) from January to July this year as Luzon braces for thin power reserves during these seven months.

“Based on the power-situation outlook for 2015 of the system operator, the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines [NGCP], for the period January 26 to July 25, 2015, the reserve capacity will be below the required contingency reserves due to scheduled maintenance shutdowns and forces outages of major base-load and gas-fired power plants in Luzon,” Meralco told the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) in its 20-page application.

Meralco filed for an approval of its interim power supply agreements (IPSAs) with TPC and Panay Power Corp. (PPC) The utility firm said its exposure to the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) for this period would be mitigated if it will source additional capacity with TPC and PPC, which have unavailable uncontracted capacity. The utility firm has already signed in November last year two IPSAs with TPC for up to 28 megawatts (MW), with an option for additional 9 MW more, and for up to 27 MW with PPC. It still has to be approved by the ERC though.

If these IPSAs are not implemented during said period when the reserve capacity will be below the

required contingency reserves, Meralco will be constrained to source from the WESM, where prices are volatile, especially during the summer months of 2015.

“This can be further aggravated and would likely result in higher WESM prices in light of the very tight supply under thin reserve margin conditions during said period,” Meralco said.

Based on the Department of Energy’s latest projection, Luzon would need at least 678 MW of additional capacity to cover both shortages and minimum reserves next year.

As such, Meralco said it is a “paramount necessity” for the ERC to approve its application so that it can immediately implement these IPSAs in order to ensure continuous and reliable electricity at reasonable prices for Meralco customers during the critical period until July this year.

TPC owns and operates a 40-MW diesel-fired power plant in Toledo, Cebu, while PPC owns a 72MW diesel-power facility in Iloilo City.

Meralco said it would pass on to its consumers the full amount of electricity fees that TPC and PPC will charge. Under the IPSA, the contract price approved is set at P10.842 per kilowatt-hour.

Last month Meralco also said it will source 450 MW of power from PanAsia Energy Inc.’s Limaypower plant during the same period.

Under an IPSA signed last December 4, PanAsia will supply Meralco up to 270 MW from January 26 to April 25, 2015 and up to 180 MW from April 26 to July 25, 2015.

Tourism

A6 Monday, January 12, 2015 • Editor: Gerard Ramos

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BACK IN BORA

BEACHFRONT

B M. S F. A| Special to the BusinessMirror

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OR some inexplicable reason, I was up at 7:30 a.m. even though I was on vacation. I peered through the window slats of my room at the Boracay Regency Beach Resort & Spa and caught a glimpse of the white beach with the sun softly glowing overhead, and puffy white clouds chased each other in the bluest of blue skies.

SWIMMING pool

CHICKEN inasal

PREMIER room

I gave a little cheer. After all, meteorologists had forecast rain for much of my vacation on the island – my first in three years. Was I ever so glad for them to be wrong.

So for three days I soaked up the sun, swam in the island’s surrounding waters again, and walked barefoot on the softest powdery-white beach.

I noticed that the beach was cleaner; there was no mucky green algae that had become typical of the island practically anytime of the year. The waters seemed to have returned to a more pristine state even on Station 2, that there were actually bigger fish darting about, swimming close to the

shore, and playfully nipping at my toes and ankles.

I woke early every day and raced down to take my breakfast at the resort’s ballroom among hundreds of other guests. The buffet tables were laden with a myriad of choices designed to please the palates of both local and foreign guests (e.g., pancakes for the Westerners, congee for the Chinese, kimchi for the Koreans, and sinangag for the Pinoys).

Boracay Regency is quite popular among domestic and foreign travelers being centrally located on Station 2, and also because it has spacious rooms and suites, about 285 of them as of the

last count. The resort is currently renovating some areas, expanding dining options, and adding more rooms.

Evening entertainment at the resort was a hoot. Its cooks and waitstaff gleefully danced to Psy’s still wildly popular “Gangnam Style” and other dance tunes. And of course the dancing was so contagious, foreigners would pick up the beat and join in the fun.

I loved swimming in the resort’s pool at the main wing especially after a heavy dinner. It was a way to melt away all the calories accumulated from a day of binge-eating and imbibing an indecent number of alcoholic beverages, before resting in my sleep-inducing bed.

Indeed, the wide array of food and beverage choices is one of the reasons Boracay continues to be one of the best places for a holiday. While there are more and more restaurants opening (and closing), I stuck with a few favorites from back in the day, which have never failed to provide not only suste-

m&Entertainment BusinessMirror

tourism@businessmirror.com.ph • Monday, January 12, 2015 A7

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ACAY’S ARMS

REGENCY cooks

LECHE flan

nance but are palate-pleasers as well.

Island Chicken is the restaurant to go to for chicken inasal the Dumaguete way. Its kansi (the Ilonggo’s version of bulalo) was also a comforting broth to someone like me who was on the verge of a cough. Its leche flan was a creamy concoction with a tamed sweetness which I liked.

Lemoni Café’s Lunchbox Specials come complete with soup, salad, sandwich and dessert. In my case, I got a beef pastrami sandwich served with toasted ciabatta bread, with pumpkin soup (it was Halloween, natch!), a raspberry vinaigrette on my tossed salad, and coconut panna cotta. For a drink, the café’s watermelon ginger crush was refreshing with just the right spot of spice.

Despite the rise of other Mexican restaurants on the island, Maya’s at Jony’s Resort still stands out for its take on tacos, burritos, margaritas and the like. Everyday as I watched the sun dip on the horizon, my friends and I would partake of the Happy Hour and order buy one, take one beers (and in my case, mojitos and vodka tonics),

LEMONI pastrami

and munch on a host of Mexican favorites like nachos, ceviches and tacos.

At the Sun Asian Kitchen, I couldn’t help but get a panic attack at the wide array of interesting ingredients spread out for the Mongolian barbecue buffet.

I confess I had two bowlfuls of barbecued meats and veggies, washed down by a bone-chilling mango fruit shake.

Boracay Regency, of course, also has its own food and beverage outlets to appease one’s hunger for just about any type of cuisine. There’s Christina’s for fine-dining options, Hap Chan for fast-food-style Chinese dishes, Mesa for a modern take on Filipino food, while guests can order an assortment of tapas and bar specials at the Wave Bar & Lounge.

At the end of my three-day holiday, I was refreshed, relaxed and pumped up to take on the demands of my work back in Manila. Of course, as I sit before my Mac rushing through an as-

LEMONI lunchbox

TRIO of ceviche

sortment of work deadlines, I can’t help but long to be back in Boracay’s arms again to enjoy another spot of fun under the sun.

(For inquiries or reservations, call Boracay Regency Beach Resort & Spa at 523-1234, or e-mail hotel@boracayregency.com.)

SUNSET

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Monday, January 12, 2015 • Editor: Efleda P. Campos

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Retired teacher returns to mentor, this time as a cathechist

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By Oliver Samson | Correspondent

HE passion to teach does not end when a teacher retires.

This holds true for Josefina F. Embile, 62, who retired at the age of 61 in 2013, after nearly four decades of teaching.

“Ma’am Embile,” as she is fondly called by her former students, is the eldest among seven. She and her siblings were raised by parents in Santa Cruz, an upland barangay in Barcelona, Sorsogon.

Through the fortune her father made as an employee of an ice-cream company in Manila, all seven children studied college.

At the time the company’s plant was razed by fire, her father had already graduated her and the four

other older children from college.

Ma’am Embile graduated from primary school at the Macabari Elementary School in the same town, finished high school at Colegio de la Milagrosa in Sorsogon City (now Saint Louise de Marillac College) in 1968, and received a bachelor’s degree in Education, major in History from the same school in 1972.

Two years later, in January, she began to teach at Barcelona Municipal High School, now Barcelona Na-

tional Comprehensive High School, where she later oversaw and advised the student council for years.

Thousands of students, many of whom she could not recall by name, had said she was among their most inspiring teacher.

She was a teacher for 39 years of her life, helping teach students who later became a telecommunications consultant, a sales manager, a naval officer, a seafarer, a teacher, and a journalist.

Like a second mother in school, she was happy and proud about the promising talents she saw among her brood of students, and at times, worried about the uncertainties that lay ahead.

Students may have forgotten to thank her for her guidance, but definitely, she was never forgotten.

She married Rodrigo Embile Sr., the father of her four children. Lorenzo, eldest, is an electrical engineer who graduated from Bicol University (BU); Rodrigo Jr., currently taking up

JOSEFINA F. Embile, 62, a retired teacher and currently a catechist, at their family house in Poblacion Norte, Barcelona, Sorsogon. OLIVER SAMSON

his master’s degree in New Mexico, is a geology graduate from University of the Philippines Diliman; Ramon, who graduated from BU, is a nurse;

Fil-Am couple home for the holidays in search of local business

By Sylvia Europa-Pinca Contributor

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DUARDO Villacorta Jr. and Marilyn Europa Villacorta are among the thousands of Filipino-Americans and overseas Filipino workers who came home last Christmas, braving the human and luggage congestion at the airports and the heavy traffic along Manila streets.

Ed, as family and friends call him, is a Baguio-born mechanical and electrical engineer who migrated to the US over 30 years ago. He started life in Miami, Florida, as a car salesman, but after a few years, managed to use his engineering skills again, working in companies manufacturing plastics and sheet metals.

Today, he co-owns a steelmanufacturing company which builds, among others, bus shelters in Miami.

Ed believes the time is right for business and other investments in the Philippines with the economy in the upswing, a stable government and increasing consumer confidence.

“It is good to be home and be with family and friends again,” Ed said.

“We also want to look into possible business opportunities and investments which will, hopefully, keep us useful and productive in our country of birth.”

The Villacortas have resided in EDUARDO Villacorta Jr., 64, and his wife Marilyn, smile as they spot their relatives, upon their arrival last Cooper City, Florida, for more than month at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

30 years and have two children.

“It’s nice to be home again after being away for sometime. I think we were here five years ago but all these hassles are worth coming home for,” he said. With him was his wife Marilyn who looked forward to a great holiday.

Marilyn was born and raised in Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya.

She took her nursing course at the University of Santo Tomas, worked briefly as a nurse in the Philippine Veterans Hospital before leaving for the US in the ’80s.

“It’s been a long time since I left Manila for the US but I usually communicate with my siblings and come for a visit every opportunity I get,” she said.

Today, Marilyn is a senior nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, at the heart of Miami Beach. She left the Philippines in her early 20s and came home 10 years later to tie the knot with Ed, her college sweetheart.

“I wanted the most memorable occasion in my life to be held in my native country,” she said.

Shortly after their marriage, they left the Philippines to start a new life in Florida whose climate is similar to that of Baguio City where Ed came from. They live in a beautiful house in Cooper City, Florida, beside a lake.

Despite their success in the US, Ed and Marilyn said their home country, the Philippines, will always be in their hearts.

and Genevieve, youngest, who went to Ago Medical and Educational Center in Legazpi City, is also a nurse.

In 2013, not long after she retired,

she returned to school, not to mentor again for formal education, but as a catechist, to help Saint Joseph parish church in its formation apostolate for the young in Barcelona.

It’s not the first time she taught catechism though. Back in college she was a cathechist.

Currently teaching catechism to students in BNCHS, the school she taught at for 39 years, Ma’am Embile said she will give formative instructions as long as she can.

She is alarmed by the downside of the advancement in the media technology, particularly the unbridled contents available to young minds, threatening the moral formation of young people, and cntributing to widen society’s moral collapse.

Though not outspoken on political issues, she observed that the town needs more able leaders and particularly the young people, who are not inclined to exercise their right to suffrage.

CBCP lauds P-Noy’s decision to grant executive clemency to sick and elderly prisoners

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HE Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has lauded the decision of President Aquino to grant executive clemency to elderly, sick and long-interned prisoners. Archbishop Socrates Villegas, CBCP president, said the granting of clemency to these prisoners only shows that the government is supporting the message of Pope Francis.

“The CBCP lauds the President’s action and sees it as a signal that we are, indeed, trying our best to be a nation of mercy and compassion as Pope Francis urges all nations to be,” Villegas said in a statement.

“The highest achievement of the penal and correctional system cannot be the suffering of the offender, but his reintegration into society after he has owned up to his responsibility. We pray for the maturation in our land of truly restorative justice,” the Lingayen-Dagupan prelate added.

Pope Francis will be in the country from January 15 to 19. For his part, Rodolfo Diamante, executive secretary of the Episcopal Commission on Prison Pastoral Care of the CBCP, said they are constantly praying for the President to exercise his constitutional power to grant executive

clemency to these inmates.

“We have been praying that P-Noy will act on the recommendation favorably,” he said in a text message.

He said the Board of Pardons and Parole has recommended 140 prisoners for executive clemency.

Earlier, Vice President Jejomar C. Binay expressed support for the plan of President Aquino to pardon aged and sick inmates at the New Bilibid Prison as a gift to Pope Francis.

“This is welcome news that is certainly in line with the message of love and compassion that the pope represents,” Binay said in a media statement on Monday Binay said the impending pardon for the qualified inmates will bring hope to other inmates who have atoned for their crimes and wish to become productive members of society again.

In his Christmas message, the Vice President appealed for mercy for inmates “who have recognized and have paid for their crimes and should be given the opportunity to rejoin society.

He also expressed hope that elderly prisoners get to spend their twilight years with their family.

On November 27, 2014 the Board of Pardons and Parole submitted the names of 47 inmates eligible for executive clemency.

Bus driver leaves job after 41 years PhilHealth to register 300,000

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ROM telling each elementary, middle and high-school student “good morning,” “how are you?” or “that’s a nice new shirt” in the morning to saying “goodbye,” “have a nice night” and “see you tomorrow” as they exited for home, Carol Sigmon said she wanted each student to feel her care and love for them.

“The first [bus driving] class I took, they told me I might be the only person who tells that child good morning,” she said last December 17, just two days before she retired as a full-time driver, leaving the job she has held for 41 years. “That stuck with me.”

Safety has always been Sigmon’s first goal, followed closely by being a positive influence in the students’ lives. Her driving record is a testament to how seriously she took those goals.

During her 41 years of driving a school bus, Sigmon had only one wreck, and it was not her fault. A driver who had not properly cleared her windows of frost and fog did not see the large, yellow bus coming toward her and pulled out in front of it.

Silver Valley Elementary Principal Christy

Slate said Sigmon is a remarkable woman with a true concern for students.

“Honestly in knowing her, I think it is a testament that she never considered this just a job,” Slate said. “She does this for the kids. I personally, through knowing her and seeing her at sports events, know that kids flock to her. She has a way with kids. She loves them.

I don’t think we will find anyone else like her.”

Sigmon, 72, began driving a school bus while a senior at Central Davidson High School. It was the only year she drove for a school outside the south Davidson schools area.

For most of her career—40 years—Sigmon has driven a shuttle route, picking up South Davidson Middle and High students first to deliver to school, then running a route to pick up Silver Valley Elementary School students. She did the same but in reverse in the afternoons.

While being interviewed, Sigmon said she wanted to stress how grateful she was for the two mechanics who kept her bus in top running order.

Besides driving a school bus for 41 years, Sigmon has also worked as a hairstylist. She began classes at beauty school the day after graduating high school and worked one year at a salon in Thomasville before opening Carol’s Beauty Shop in her home.

In addition, Sigmon cleans homes and helps some of her clients get to and from doctors and other appointments. Asked how she will feel when school begins again on Monday after the holiday break, Sigmon she said she will miss the children, but added with a grin, “I will roll over and go back to sleep.”

While quitting her bus-driving job, Sigmon has no plans to close her beauty shop or stop cleaning homes. She said she expects much of her newfound free time will be quickly filled helping elderly people in her community and church. She is an active member at Clarksbury United Methodist.

“I wish all the children will be able to do what they dream in life and to respect and love everyone,” she said. “That is the main thing—respect. May God bless them and take care of them.” Tribune Content Agency Llc.

senior citizens in Zamboanga

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AMBOANGA CITY—The Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) expects to register up to 300,000 senior citizens here in Zamboanga.

The registration of senior citizens by PhilHealth is in line with Republic Act 9994, otherwise known as the Expanded Senior Citizens Act of 2010, which President Aquino signed into law on November 6, 2014.

PhilHealth Regional Vice President Romeo Alberto said last Thursday that 58,632 senior citizens have, so far, registered all over the region since they started the conduct of registration last November 25.

“We are encouraging those senior citizens who are not yet PhilHealth members to go to the Office of the Senior Citizens’ Affairs or go direct to the PhilHealth office to register,” Alberto said.

He advised the senior citizens to bring with them their senior citizens card, birth certificate, and other proof of age when they register.

He said senior citizens who are dependents

of a PhilHealth member can also register “so they will have their own PhilHealth membership” card.

He said it will be of great help for a senior citizen to become a registered PhilHealth member since a person would experience several health complications once they get older.

He said a senior citizen can immediately avail themselves of the PhilHealth benefits once they register. Those who are presently admitted in the hospitals can also register to be able to avail of the benefits.

He said among the benefits they can avail upon hospitalization include discounts on room rates, medicines, laboratory, operating room, payment of the physician’s professional fee like the surgeon and anaesthesiologist and several other PhilHealth packages.

Alberto disclosed the funding that will be used in granting senior citizens of PhilHealth benefits come from the government’s collection of“‘sin” taxes. PNA

news@businessmirror.com.ph

VP Binay: 120,000 housing units for Yolanda victims to be finished by 2015

By Recto Mercene

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OVERNMENT housing agencies are targeting to complete 120,000 housing units in 2015 for families displaced by Supertyphoon Yolanda in 2013.

Vice President Jejomar C. Binay, chairman of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) and head of the Yolanda Resettlement Cluster, said that as of December 2014, P13.4 billion has been released for the construction of 46,129 housing units. Of these, 37,500 have already been awarded to winning bidders.

“By the end of 2015, we plan to provide disaster-resilient housing in safer communities to families living in high-risk and hazardous areas,” Binay said.

Binay said an additional P1.3 billion has also been approved for release and another P7.99 billion in approved supplemental budget will generate an additional 31,752 housing units.

“These projects have been bid out and ready for award, but could not be awarded yet pending release of funds to the National Housing Authority,” he added.

Binay said a total of 205,128 houses are needed for Yolanda victims in 116 cities and municipalities. At the end of 2014, key shelter agencies have completed 2,100 housing units.

Bi n ay s a id go ve r n me nt housing agencies are facing several issues that hamper the implementation of the Yolanda housing project.

One of these problems is the difficulty in identifying land suitable for housing with appropriate environmental clearances. “Administrative Order 44 was issued on October 28, 2014, which is expected to fast-track the issuance of clearances and permits.

However, some concerned agencies are still crafting their respective IRRs while others have just recently started operationalizing their processes,” Binay said.

Another problem is that municipalities like Camotes Island are still classified as reserved land. “In the case of these areas, we are still waiting for a presidential proclamation that will carve out areas that can be used for housing,” Binay said.

Meanwhile, Binay recognized the need to fast-track the operationalization of Local Interagency Committees as the central planning, implementation and monitoring committee for permanent housing projects.

“Regional Resettlement Clusters have been established and regional shelter fora with mayors have been conducted to facilitate the process,” Binay said.

The Regions BusinessMirror

Monday, January 12, 2015

SMDC sees expansion ‘north or south’ of Metro Manila

S

By VG Cabuag

M Development Corp. said it will have more launches this year, more than doubling its effort in 2014, as the company said it is also looking at piloting its first horizontal development.

Jeffrey Lim, SMDC president and EVP of SM Prime Holdings Inc.’s told reporters the company will have four to five launches this year for a total of about 12,000 to 14,000 units.

For the year, SMDC will have a capital expenditure of P18 billion, part of SM Prime’s P60- billion capex,

he said. The launches are far bigger than last year’s, when it only had two condominium-project launches.

Lim said each unit will sell for P3 million.

“We’re working on horizontal development, but that is still in the planning stages but, hopefully, we

can launch one project within the year,” Lim said.

He did not divulge the location of its first horizontal project, since SMDC is still in the final stages of negotiations, but this will be located either “up north or south” of Metro Manila.

“It’s not going to be significant in terms of SMDC’s total number, but we would like to try that,” Lim said.

He said there is demand for the horizontal-project units, especially from overseas Filipino workers, who can afford the lower range of the housing units at about P800,000 to P1.2 million.

“We’re still in the drawing board for that [low-cost brand]. Once we have that, then we can accelerate the plans for the launching,” he said.

On SMDC premier, Lim said its

Air project is in Makati City and the location itself called for the project to be sold at a premium.

“We see a lot of demand continuing. In December we were able to book P4 billion of sales. It was not a record high because there was a time we had P5 billion. But being able to get into that kind of range only means there’s a lot of demand, in terms of affordable residential condominium,” Lim said.

SM Prime said it had a 12-percent increase in net income for the third quarter of 2014, from the strong growth in rental revenues of its shopping malls all over the country.

The company said its profit hit P3.7 billion for the period, from P3.3 billion in the previous year, sustaining the 12-percent growth posted in the first half of the year.

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This brought its nine-month income to P13.5 billion, also up by 12 percent, while revenues rose to P47.8 billion, an increase of 9 percent year on year. “Our first year as a consolidated property business is proving to be rewarding not only in terms of our strong financial performance.

We are now enjoying the scale and the synergy that the whole group brings to the table, which allows us to plan and execute our projects in a manner that will provide greater value and more enhanced lifestyles for our customers.” SM Prime President Hans Sy said.

SM Prime’s rental revenues from retail and commercial space, which accounted for more than half of its business, grew by 11 percent, to P26.4 billion, from P23.8 billion in 2013 in the first nine months of 2014.

NGCP turns over 10 school buildings to Leyte beneficiaries

By Lenie Lectura

T San Juan Jaycees Businesswoman Abigail Arceo-David (seated, second from left), new president of the Junior Chamber International Philippines (JCI) San Juan Pinaglabanan, and other officers of the group also known as Philippine Jaycees Inc. join San Juan Mayor Guia G. Gomez (seated, center) and Sen. Joseph Victor “JV” Gomez Ejercito (standing, second from left) during the JCI chapter’s 51st induction and turnover ceremonies at the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club in Mandaluyong City on Saturday. Joining them are (seated, from left) 2015 Regional Vice President Metro East Region Jeanette Merily de Vera, JCI San Juan Pinaglabanan 2014 President Michael Tan To, 2015 National President JCI Philippines Brian Lim; and (standing , from left) Santo Tomas, Pampanga Vice Mayor Mark Louie Arceo, former Pampanga Board Member Olga Frances “Fritzie” David-Dizon and her brother Glenn Roy David, and Nadinee Arceo and her husband former Santo Tomas Mayor Lucas Arceo. Arceo-David and the San Juan Pinaglabanan chapter officers and members, as well as JCI members from Singapore and South Korea spearheaded an outreach program benefiting mostly poor people at Porac, Pampanga, on Sunday. LEO VILLACARLOS

ARMM sets up P100-M nerve emergency operations center

By Manuel T. Cayon

Mindanao Bureau Chief

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AVAO CITY—The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao would put up the nerve center of its emergencyresponse operations with P100 million worth of equipment.

The nerve center of the Humanitarian Emergency Action and Response Team (HEART) operation center would be put up inside the regional government center in Cotabato City, in a 500-square-meter area, said Laisa Alamia, ARMM executive secretary. “The operation center will

be the nerve center of the Regional Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council [RDRRMC] operations,” she said.

“The ARMM-HEART 24/7 operation center will primarily cater to the constituents of Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi province affected by armed conflict and natural disasters,” she said.

In 2014 the response team delivered 18,000 food packs to flood victims and catered to the psychotherapy and other needs of the 4,234 families affected by armed conflicts in the provinces of Maguindanao, Tawi-Tawi, Sulu and Basilan.

Aside from armed conflicts, Alamia said the team would also respond to and monitor the recurring issue of deportees from Sabah, Malaysia.

She said the ARMM-HEART was among the emergency groups that immediately responded to the relief and emergency needs of families affected by Supertyphoon Yolanda in Tolosa, Leyte, and by the Zamboanga siege in 2013.

But she called on local governments to strengthen their own emergency response teams, saying that they should “be the front-line emergency response team in their respective areas.”

HE National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) has completed 10 of the 21 school buildings it committed to build in Leyte.

Three schools were turned over to beneficiaries in November last year, while the seven newly completed threeclassroom school buildings were turned over last Friday.

The classrooms will benefit around 10,000 students displaced by Supertyphoon Yolanda.

The 21 beneficiary schools are spread out in nine local government units (LGUs) of Leyte namely, Palo, Tolosa, Ormoc City, Tanauan, Santa Fe, Alangalang, Barugo, Carigara and Capoocan.

Beneficiaries include Gacao Elementary School, Caloogan Elementary School, and Palo I Central School in Palo; Santa Fe Central School and Tibak Elementary School, both in Santa Fe; Dolores Elementary School in Ormoc; and Santa Rosa Elementary School in Barugo.

NGCP’s three-classroom buildings are built sturdier, and can withstand wind velocities of up to 250 kilometers per hour, the standard of the Department of Public Works and Highways for typhoon-resilient structures.

The classrooms’ roofing is reinforced using a new method of connecting the galvanized iron sheet to the trestle. The walls are thicker, almost double the width of the old classrooms’ walls. Moreover, the facilities have movable dividers and can be used as evacuation centers during calamities or for other indoor school activities.

The project was initiated and completed in line with NGCP’s corporate

Cebu declares MPTC original proponent for third ₧16.5-B Cebu-Mactan bridge

EBU CITY—Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama declared the Metro Pacific Tollways Corp. (MPTC) as the original proponent of the proposed P16.5-billion third bridge that will link Cebu to Mactan Island. Rama said he already signed the certification that declared MPTC the original proponent of the third bridge project.

The bridge project will be a joint undertaking of the Cebu City government and the municipal government of cordova with the project proponent MPTC of business tycoon Manuel V. Pangilinan.

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“I am very happy that they are already done with the review,” he said.

The Cebu City Joint Venture Committee for the third bridge has wrapped up its review of the proposal that MPTC submitted to the city government.

The municipality of Cordova broke ground for the project on Shell Island on January 1. One approach of the bridge will be in the town’s Shell Island. Cordova, Cebu, Mayor Adelino Sitoy said the constr uction of the third bridge will begin within the year.

Rama said the groundbreaking prompted him to fast-track Cebu City’s review of the project proposal. But Rama said he wanted some items modified, particularly the approach of the bridge in the Cebu City side.

MPTC proposed that the approach of the bridge will be placed near the Cebu South Coastal Road viaduct, in front of Barangay Duljo-Fatima.

Rama said he wants it at the mouth of the Guadalupe River, near Barangay Pasil.

Rama did not disclose what other modifications he will ask for. PNA

Fighting frost A Farmer in Paoay, Atok, Benguet, rushes to save their lettuce plants as a cold spell continues to hit highland vegetables. Temperature in the mountain farms has gone down to 8 ˚C. MAU VICTA

social responsibility projects which aim to contribute to the development of education in the country. “This project is one very close to our hearts.”

After seeing the devastation brought

by Yolanda and taking a direct part in restoration and rebuilding, we felt it necessary to carry over these efforts beyond transmission facilities.

“The school is said to be the second home of children, and for them to see their school rise from the ruins of the typhoon will empower them,” NGCP Head of Corporate Affairs Nelson F. Cabangon said.

“Just as with our transmission facilities, our mind-set in this project was not just to rebuild, but to rebuild stronger and better,” he said.

As a corporation with a public-service orientation, NGCP partners with relevant institutions to support the communities hosting its transmission facilities, which it considers as true partners in nation-building.

NGCP is a privately owned corporation in charge of operating, maintaining, and developing the country’s power grid.

It transmits high-voltage electricity through “power superhighways” that include the interconnected system of transmission lines, towers, substations, and related that include the interconnected system of transmission lines, towers, substations and related assets. The consortium holds the 25-year concession to operate the country’s power transmission network and is comprised of Monte Oro Grid Resources Corp. led by Henry Sy Jr., Calaca High Power Corp. led by Robert Coyiuto Jr., and the State Grid Corp. of China as technical partner.

Opinion BusinessMirror

A10 Monday, January 12, 2015

editorial

The Philippine real-estate trends

G

lobal professional services network and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers recently released its “Emerging Trends in Real Estate Asia Pacific 2015” report. This is a survey and analysis of the property markets in the region.

With our near obsession with rankings and scores, the first takeaway from the report is that the Philippines placed in the eighth spot falling from No. 4 in 2014. The ranking rates overall foreign interest in investing in all types of Philippine real estate from office building to housing.

Local reviews of the report centered on the obvious. The government and regulations get much of the blame for this lack of foreign investor interest. “Limited opportunities, restrictions on foreign ownership of land and ongoing concern about transparency and arbitrary bureaucratic conduct have dampened interest in the local real-estate market.” That is old news.

The most sensible measure to gain the benefits for restricting foreign ownership, while avoiding the disadvantages is clearly found in the real-estate investment trust (REIT) vehicle, which has been used across the globe for decades. In the Philippines we have Republic Act 9856, or “An Act Providing the Legal Framework for Real Estate Investment Trust and for Other Purposes”. A REIT is like a stock or mutual fund that would be traded on the stock market and then invested in real estate. Because it would be a registered security, foreigners could own 40 percent of the “company”.

However, a maze of unwieldy tax laws has stopped any REIT from being formed as the laws effectively kill the REIT on arrival.

The positives for our property sector are also somewhat old news.

Overseas remittances are being used to buy houses and condominiums and the outsourcing industry is taking up the office space. Commercial property is being used to support and take advantage of the economic growth contributed to by remittances and outsourcing. “Chronic shortcomings in local infrastructure also are a long-standing concern, the survey said.

Most local news reports quoted this passage from the survey: “Although the Philippines is ‘no longer the sick man of Asia,’ it is by no means an easy market for foreigners to target.” But the next sentence is what we found to be most interesting. “In particular, there is no shortage of local capital and, therefore, limited demand for private equity investors.”

In other words, our property sector does not need foreign money to expand and prosper.

This is as positive as foreign funds leaving countries, like the Philippines when the US raises its interest rates should not affect our realestate business.

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RISING SUN

W

E greet with joy and anticipation the papal visit of Pope Francis from the 15th to 19th of this month, when His Holiness will personally convey his pastoral messages to the Filipino people.

Pope Francis will be the third pontiff to visit the Philippines.

The first was Pope Paul VI, who came in November 1970 and held several Masses in public, among other activities over a three-day stay.

Pope John Paul II visited twice, the first time in February 1981 to beatify Saint Lorenzo Ruiz in the first beatification ceremony outside of Rome, the second time in 1995 for World Youth Day. The latter event’s closing Mass at Luneta Park drew an estimated 5 million people, making it the largest papal gathering in history.

The messages of both popes focused on Jesus Christ and themes of the Church, life and love. Pope Francis, in his turn, will be spreading a message of mercy and compassion.

On January 18 a multilingual Mass will be offered at Luneta Park.

The languages to be employed are Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano and English, with some verses in Capampangan, Bikol, Waray and Hiligaynon, as well as Spanish and Latin.

The Mass will employ many musical arrangements to be rendered by a 100-instrument orchestra and a 1,000-voice choir.

nnn

The New Year vin d’honneur is being held today at Malacañan Palace to mark the start of the year and to allow government officials, members of the diplomatic corps and other guests a chance to interact with each other socially.

The event is a morning reception held twice a year: one sometime in January, the other on June 12, Independence Day. It was established in the country during the American colonial period as an open-house event for government officials and later evolved to include members of the diplomatic corps.

A highlight of the vin d’honneur (“wine of honor,” a term adopted during the time of President Cora-

zon C. Aquino) is the toast between the President of the Philippines and the Papal Nuncio, who is the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps (a tradition upheld in Catholic countries, or those that were formerly part of the Spanish empire).

Guests enter the Palace’s State Entrance and are received in the Music Room, a practice instituted by President Corazon Aquino and continued

by President Benigno Aquino III. From there the guests proceed to the Rizal Ceremonial Hall, where the President delivers remarks and toasts “the prosperity and well-being of the Filipino people,” according to a briefer on the vin d’honneur at the website malacañang.gov.ph.

It is my honor to attend this event and wish that it be successful and productive, and I look forward to meeting the President, fellow public officials, diplomats and other guests.

Through this and similar meetings, may our commitment to public service be recharged and revitalized. nnn

Rojas is vice chairman and general manager of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.

Rebutting floating exchange-rate fantasies

Dennis D. Estopace Eduardo A. Davad Nonilon G. Reyes

BusinessMirror is published daily by the Philippine Business Daily Mirror

HOM

Atty. Jose Ferdinand M. Rojas II

The government is well-prepared for this historical and significant visit that is expected to draw millions to the various venues, where Pope Francis will appear to the public.

We welcome His Holiness to the country, and hope that his visit will encourage believers and renew their trust and faith in God and love for fellowman.

Jun B. Vallecera

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Welcome, Pope Francis

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Paul Donovan

T

he rise of the dollar in recent weeks has been significant.

The dollar’s move has coincided and in some way caused the decline of global commodity prices, and as such it takes place against the backdrop of a generally low inflation environment. At the December meeting of the US Federal Reserve, the American central bank was very clear about ignoring the impact of oil prices on the US inflation rate. Does the dollar’s move higher change US inflation and the Fed’s response? And could the dollar’s weakness provide a boost to the lackluster economy of Europe, and the recession hit economy of Japan?

The answer to the questions is a pretty resounding “no” and “no”.

The dollar’s strength is not likely to delay US interest-rate increases, nor is it likely to change the relative competitiveness of European or Japanese exports. The only prices that are likely to react to the dollar’s strength are commodity prices, because commodities are universally priced in dollars. Otherwise, very different conditions prevail.

Attending a conference in Mexico last month, I heard a former government minister extolling the virtues of the Mexican auto manufacturers, pointing to the exports of cars and sport utility vehicles that Mexico was selling to the US. Then he noted “but of course, the car that we sell in the US will already have crossed the US-Mexican border 17 times, on average.” This is one reason floating

exchange rates have a limited impact. Global trade has become complex. That “Mexican” car is stuffed full of components from the US, and indeed Canada, whisked back and forth across international borders before the car is finally assembled in Mexico. It could more properly be called a “North American’”car than a “Mexican” car. The value of the peso against the US dollar is a pretty small factor in the price of a “Mexican” car sold in the US. It is the same elsewhere. Supply chains are long and complex. Finished products are simply agglomerations of cosmopolitan components from around the world. This lessens the importance of foreign-exchange markets to international trade.

The other factor that reduces the importance of foreign-exchange markets is pragmatism on the part

of companies. Companies know that what goes up in the world of foreign exchange this year, may well just come right back down again next year. Why risk customer loyalty and carefully nurtured market share by changing export prices every time the foreign-exchange market has a convulsion? Companies are prepared to accept fluctuations in their profit margins rather than jeopardize a market presence that may have taken decades to build.

Companies will set their prices according to local market conditions.

There is a simple way of demonstrating this. The US breaks down import prices and domestic producer prices into a large number of subcomponents. Economists can compare 128 sectors and subsectors of the economy. If the dollar’s strength was going to have a meaningful impact on the import price in these 128 sectors, then the correlation of import prices with the dollar’s movements should be higher than the correlation of import prices with US producer prices for the same products. If the producer prices are better correlated, then importers into the US are ignoring currency markets and focusing on local market conditions.

The result of such a comparison is overwhelming. About 16 out of the 128 sectors could claim to have import prices that are influenced by the movement of the dollar. For all other sectors the correlation to the dollar’s movement is low, and for nearly all other sectors the correlation to US domestic producer prices is greater than is the correlation to the dollar.

In other words importers into the US

set prices according to local market conditions, and the movement of the dollar is background noise.

Therefore, the volume of exports from the rest of the world to the US is not likely to change. Why should it? The dollar price of the product is not changing. Exporters to the US may make more profits when their dollars are converted back into local currency, but that is a different story.

This means that the dollar’s strength is: (1) Unlikely to significantly increase importers’ market share into the US. (2) Unlikely to lead to a relative decline/competitive advantage for non-commodity import prices into the US, and thus limited US deflation pressures.

(3) Unlikely to lead to a significant real gross domestic product boost from rising real exports in the Euro area or Japan—although the profits earned by exporters in the Euro and Japan could independently generate growth if the profits are invested or paid out in higher wages.

Paul Donovan is the managing director and deputy head of global economics of Zurich-headquartered UBS. He is responsible for formulating and presenting the UBS Investment Research global economic view, drawing on the bank’s worldwide resources.

Donovan took up philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University.

He holds an MSc in financial economics from the University of London. In the Philippines, his column will appear exclusively once a month in the BusinessMirror.

Opinion BusinessMirror

opinion@businessmirror.com.ph

Japan flirts with governance reform

The Antonio Banderas of the faith

Bergoglio wasn’t blind to the flaws of Perón and his wife (he gave up on his second wife, Isabelita, a pawn of the Argentine pro-business military). But he saw that only someone as charismatic like Perón, possessed by his own populist rhetoric, could mobilize the poor to take on what Pope Paul VI had described as the oppressive structures of capitalism.

The struggle was close to home.

The young Bergoglio’s cousin, Lt. Col. Oscar Lorenzo Cogorno, was one of 18 killed by firing squad for

taking part in a failed coup against the pro-rich president General Aramburu. Bergoglio’s biographer, Austen Iverreigh, wrote that the young priest favored political parties that favored lifting the ban on Perónists running for office. The Army had imposed a ban.

Indeed, like other students at Casa Loyola, the young Bergoglio lived in the tension of opposing forces in Argentine society, writes Iverreigh; on the one hand, the temptation to fight fire with fire— the Army’s bullets with the ter-

rorists’ bombs; on the other hand, the Jesuit discernment that the means we take prefigure, as Roberto Mangabeira Unger told us in his class, as well as it can disfigure—as Bergoglio believed, the good that we seek. In this case, the liberation of the poor. The current woman president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, was a Montonero terrorist like the husband she succeeded and not a few of the sons of Argentine’s upper class who used their high education in chemistry to make bombs. (You gotta give it to these Latin Americans, the children of their rich are not totally useless like ours.)

Kirchner has hated Francis for opting for charity, instead of terror, to combat poverty. But the young Bergoglio did not think he was running from the fight. He, too, was fighting but in the way Christ taught. He, too, was a soldier in the Society of Jesus. If only he could remake the Society as the founder intended: not as an army for a passing day but an army in the battlefield of the seemingly endless night; holding the line until, and advancing, to meet the promised coming of the light.

politician and activist when I learned that 12 French citizens, including some legendary journalists and cartoonists, had been gunned down by crazed Islamists in Paris. I thought of her because she faces their probable fate, and continues to do what they did up until the very moment of their murders in an editorial meeting: speak a humorous, frank and biting truth to brutal power.

Ali was unfazed by the amateurish, collegiate critics who tried to block her speech, because she saw in them what so many of us see in these churlish children: naïveté. You cannot take seriously little boys and girls who depend on daddy and mama for their educations, who’ve never in their pampered, precious lives confronted evil Islamic gunmen hell bent on silencing dissent.

As I watched the reports from Paris, and as I saw my great grandfather’s countrymen

stand up and stare back with a defiance only the French can pull off, I felt ashamed of the type of protests I’ve seen on American streets.

The marchers who scream “What do we want/ Dead cops/When do we want it/Now!” and the ladies who dress up in high heels and lingerie for their noble “Slut Walks” make me long for the days of truly valuable speech, the kind that was met with bullhorns, bats and beatings. The kind that honored the First, most important Amendment in its effort to shatter the complacent, complicit silence.

Ali still shatters the silence with powerful messages of defiance and courage. She is not afraid to call out the demonic aspect of a religion that has bewitched evil men, and is paying the price with a sacrificed and unsettled life of constant movement and anxiety.

She is made of the same elements, fire and earth, that animated the great Frenchmen who

combined passion with pragmatism, and told serious truths with deadly humor. They’ve paid for their courage in blood.

In this country, even among the mediocre masses on college campuses and in our streets, there are people who stand apart and shine like human stars. The Philadelphia Daily News’ beloved Signe Wilkinson is one of them, a woman who pricks and prods and pulls at the conscience of those in her extended Philadelphia family. Her ability to distill the truth from the froth of daily waste product in the marketplace of ideas earned her a Pulitzer, but entitles her to much more: our collective gratitude.

The late Tony Auth, who angered and disgusted me for decades was another brave one who used his pen and his skills to aim arrows at the figures and institutions who’d earned (unjustifiably, I often thought) his mighty ink-stained wrath.

Teddy Locsin Jr.

By Noah Smith Bloomberg View

D

O you know what a “hostess” is in Japan? If you guessed that it’s a woman who greets you at the entrance of a restaurant, guess again. “Hostess” in Japan refers to a woman who works in a bar or a lounge and is paid to flirt with men.

A French journalist once referred to them as “prostitutes who do not think they are prostitutes.”

Japanese corporate employees are the main customers at hostess bars.

It’s a tradition in Japan to send (allmale) work teams to hostess clubs after hours, on the company dime. These sessions are often mandatory. Clients are also traditionally taken to hostess clubs by salesmen. Companies pay for these excursions, which go under the heading of “entertainment expenses.”

These entertainment expenses are quite high. Decades of slow economic growth have squeezed corporate expense accounts, so, in 2013, Shinzo Abe’s government introduced a plan to make “entertainment expenses” partially tax-deductible for large businesses (as they already are for small companies).

Needless to say, this is probably not a step in the right direction for Abe’s “Womenomics” initiative. But, even more important, it illustrates one of Japan’s biggest structural problems: poor corporate governance. Fortunately, thanks to a new set of guidelines being introduced by Abe’s administration, governance may be about to experience a revolution.

Japan’s approach to corporate governance has, for the past 40 years, been very different from that of the US. Independent directors are very rare and boards are filled with corporate managers. As you might expect, this makes companies focus more on empire-building than on creating shareholder value and boosting low profitability. Wasting money on useless perks like hostess-club visits is merely a symptom of a much-deeper disease.

There is evidence that poor corporate governance is also partly responsible for the drought in business investment that is holding back Abenomics. International Monetary Fund economists Chie Aoyagi and Giovanni Ganelli, in a recent paper, show that companies that score more poorly on a Bloomberg measure of corporate governance tend to hoard more cash.

Smart people in Japan’s finance industry and bureaucracy have been beating the drum for change for a long time now, and it looks as if the ruling Liberal Democratic Party might finally be ready to dance. Since mid-2014, Abe’s government has been talking about a new corporate governance code, which would enhance the number of outside directors and encourage greater concern for shareholders.

Now, a draft of the new guidelines has been released to the public. Instead of hard-and-fast rules, it focuses on general principles, and adopts a “comply-or-explain” approach. Companies are basically being told what kind of things to do, and being warned that if they don’t do them, bureaucrats will notice and will give them a hard time.

It remains to be seen if these loose

principles and vague threats will be as effective as hard-and-fast rules would be. On one hand, the absence of specific targets may signal to Japanese companies that the government isn’t serious about forcing anyone to change. On the other hand, the lack of hard guidelines may spur companies to exert greater effort just to be on the safe side, and the vague threats of negative attention by a powerful bureaucracy may provide an incentive for companies to try to outdo their peers to escape notice by the watchdogs.

As for the content of the code, it’s all very encouraging stuff. Companies are admonished to maintain better communication with shareholders, to value shareholders based on the size of their ownership stake and to focus more on increasing shareholder value. Anti-takeover measures are also discouraged; a step, I think, might be the most important if it is enforced.

There is a provision encouraging diversity and the promotion of women.

Another provision mandates the use of neutral external auditors. There is, as expected, a mandate to include outside directors on every board. And there are many admonishments to enhance profitability.

Veteran observers of Japan have become used to false starts and rapid reversals of reform over the past two decades. But, in a recent interview, Nicholas Benes, head of the Board Director Training Institute of Japan, said that he thinks Japan is serious this time around: “The government understands that they need to improve productivity here or we have a real debt default crisis looming. When I started 15 years of corporate advocacy, I used to be told you couldn’t use the word productivity, because to Japanese it sounds like “restructuring,” which sounds like you’re firing people. And now we’ve got the Japanese government itself saying that we need productivity and governance is good and connected to productivity. There’s no way you can view this as other than a sea change...

Japanese people are very quick about executing stuff; now that it’s national policy, the crane has squawked—the one cry of the crane that makes all the others fly. So the fact that the government has clearly set forth all these concepts in its policy document, is a crucial tipping point.”

There is at least one sign that Benes is actually being conservative in his predictions. In the interview, he predicted that a diversity clause wouldn’t be included in the corporate governance code. But it was.

So the world will watch as Japan decides whether to embrace neoliberalism after all. If this corporate-governance code passes, and if companies heed it, Abe’s legacy will be assured.

‘Nous sommes Charlie’

By Christine M. Flowers Philadelphia Daily News/TNS

A

FEW months ago, Brandeis University disgraced its honorable namesake, the great Supreme Court justice, and decided to rescind an honorary degree and speaking invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ali, the controversial critic of Islam, became the target of histrionic collegiate ranting, the type of florid and juvenile expression that is utterly worthless but nonetheless protected by the First Amendment. Even sound and fury, signifying nothing, gets constitutional cover.

At the time, I just shook my head and hoped the pampered, preening coeds would take time out from their self-important strutting and realize how fortunate they were to live in a country where unpopular voices were not only protected, they were actively solicited. I fantasized about some of the female protestors flexing their free speech muscles in a public square in Iran and getting more of an education than they’d ever get in their interdepartmental,

multicultural seminars on “Feminism And The Meaning of No.” And then I reread Ali’s two memoirs, Infidel and Nomad, to remind myself that a woman who has suffered genital mutilation, death threats and ultimate exile is, so far, superior to our coddled brand of reproducto-feminist that hers will be the voice that continues to resonate when the others fade quickly into irrelevancy.

I thought of this brave writer, filmmaker,

Monday, January 12, 2015 A11

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Free fire

ALL him the Antonio Banderas of the true faith. Pope Francis was a Péronista or at least a devoted fan of former Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón. As a novice in the Society of Jesus, he was close to the Guardia de Hierro—the Iron Guard of Perón, a name reminiscent of its Romanian predecessor but benign. The young Jorge Bergoglio was drawn to the pro-poor, nationalist and anticapitalist husband of Evita for whom Argentina continues to cry.

Bergoglio’s ambition was to refocus the Society in Argentina from a condescending liberation (the poor had to be led by the rebellious educated sons of the rich) to evangelization (the poor must be joined, lived among, so that one can learn how they cope with the common condition of man in the capitalist world and thereby, acquire the fortitude to remake that world. To refocus the crusade for social justice away from cold criticism of the ignorance of the poor to embracing their wisdom and their passionate ways of worship as the best strategy toward the comprehensive defeat of the power of money. Live like the poor, so the money loses its grip on the world.

There, we have yet another aspect of the man who is coming to town. This guy is serious. He has lived through the worst and seen the best; among them the communist militants he opposed ideologically but protected physically. He allowed one to be buried secretly in the garden of his religious house for the peace she had fought for, and which eluded her all her life.

These two giants worked under the vaulting arc of freedom provided by the Founding Fathers, and didn’t need to worry too much about death threats (although they came) and censors. This country gives them that.

France is our soul sister, who took our Declaration of Independence and refined it into the Rights of Man. She had been both our teacher and our student, our model and our imitator, our friend and our “frenemy.” We need to stand beside her now, in solidarity, if only to convince ourselves that the Signes and Auths and Alis will continue to have our open ears, open hearts and open minds.

Brandeis, for all of its childish fits of fury, is an exception to the rule. In this country, we listen to the dissonant voices. And we cry out, in unity, with those who bleed because of the truths they’ve told.

Nous sommes Charlie.

2nd Front Page BusinessMirror

A12 Monday, January 12, 2015

PESO SEEN DEPRECIATING BY 3 PERCENT THIS YEAR T

By Bianca Cuaresma

he peso could weaken by up to 3 percent, relative to last year’s exchange rate, no matter the occassional presence of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) in the foreign-exchange market to smoothen the excesses, an economist said.

ING Bank Manila senior economist Joey Cuyegkeng, on looking ahead, said the peso will likely face a 2-percent to 3-percent depreciation this year and next.

This means the peso may trade between 45.50 and 46 to a dollar this year and in 2016, as the US dollar strengthens on the basis of recovery and anticipation of policy normalization in the world’s largest economy “Global uncertainties play a significant role. Local political uncertainties will play an increasing role, as the economy moves closer to the May 2016 national/presidential elections,” Cuyegkeng said.

Latest data from the Philippine Dealings System show the peso moving within a very narrow band in the first week of the year, starting at 45 but rounding the week at 45.064 per dollar.

Earlier, BSP Governor Amando M. Tet-

angco Jr. made it known that the peso is likely to see bouts of volatility this year, but vowed as always to maintain a moderating presence in the market. He also expressed confidence on the country’s growth story as helping insulate the $270-billion economy from the debilitating impact of a weakening currency.

“We expect some volatility in the market in the near-term because of the growing consensus for a strong US dollar. But, as in previous episodes of volatility and portfolio outflows, there will be core investors, who will remain invested in the Philippines because of our positive growth prospects and sound fundamentals,” Tetangco said in a public forum.

Cuyegkeng is of the view the country’s current economic standing— its favorable external position, low inflation and continued growth— will temper the anticipated shocks from a stronger US dollar in the months ahead. “But, unlike some Asian currencies in 2014, the peso’s weakness is contained by favorable external payments position, a healthy monetary sector, a vigilant monetary authority and good economic growth,” Cuyegkeng said.

Strong quake rocks Philippine capital, no damage, injuries

P

hilippine seismologists say a 6-magnitude earthquake has jolted the capital, Manila, rousing people from their sleep. There are no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

Renato Solidum of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the predawn quake was centered under the sea about 27 miles (43 kilometers) southwest of the town of San Antonio in the northwest-

ern province of Zambales, but was too deep under the seabed to cause any significant damage or casualties. Solidum says aftershocks are expected, adding the quake was also felt across the main northern Luzon island. The Philippine archipelago lies in the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where earthquakes and volcanic activities are common.

A 7.7-magnitude quake killed nearly 2,000 people in Luzon in 1990. AP

www.businessmirror.com.ph

SRPs should reflect impact of cheaper oil

T

By Catherine N. Pillas

he Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is confident the cost of goods and services will further decrease this year on the continued drop of global oil prices, but implored noncomplying groups to make sure the fuel savings will be reflected in their suggested retail prices (SRPs).

“One of the great benefits this year will be the impact of oil on prices, because electricity and the economy, in general, depend a lot on oil,” Trade Secretary Gregory L. Domingo said in a radio interview on Saturday morning.

The trade chief explained, in a separate interview, that the plunge in oil prices impacts price reduction of goods in three ways:on direct delivery of the goods from the manufacturer to the distribution point; on the component of electricity and power used in the production of the good; and on the indirect impact on the raw-material prices used in the finished products.

The 3-percent anticipated reduction in prices earlier mentioned by the trade secretary was calculated based on the first two types of impact, particularly since there is usually a lag time on the effects of the raw materials. This should be reflected in the

suggested retail prices of select goods in the coming months, Domingo said.

Domingo highlighted that the reduction in prices, in general, should be reflected on goods that have huge power component, like cement. The trade department, through the consumer-protection group, on Friday reported that the prices of basic and prime commodities in the last quarter of 2014 have, indeed, dropped amid the decreasing cost of petroleum products.

Based on the data released by the DTIConsumer Protection Group (CPG), most of the monitored retail prices of basic and prime goods from October to December 2014 are mostly unchanged, or lower than the published SRPs by 0.06 percent to 23.53 percent.

Prevailing monitored prices of 51 brands of basic and prime goods remained at SRP levels. The products, whose prevailing prices

are lower than the SRPs, are Milkmaid Full Cream Sweetened Condensed Milk 300 ml (lower by P2.85); Alaska Evaporated Milk 370 ml (lower by P1.20); Alpine Evaporated Milk 370 ml (lower by P3.75); Nido Fortified Powdered Milk 160 g (lower by P0.05); and Anchor Full Cream Powered Milk 150g (lower by P3.05).

In the trade department’s report, the computation of the DTI revealed that adjusting downward the published SRPs due to diesel and gasoline prices at 3 percent of the distribution cost of an SRP only translates to a reduction of 0.08 percent to 12 percent in the published SRPs—much lower than allowing the market forces and competition of brands in the retail market to dictate the prices.

However, there are notable exceptions to the findings of the DTI report. It noted that SRPs for select basic goods, such as milk, bread and noodles, should go down due to lower cost of imported raw materials of skimmed milk, powdered milk and liquefied petroleum gas.

The trade chief added that prices could be even lower if logistics groups would comply with the order, since some manufacturers’ savings from the lower production costs were absorbed by their high trucking and shipping costs.

“We need to intensify our price monitoring further. If magbababa pa nga sila dahil sa cost to deliver, babantayan namin kung tama ang pagbaba o dapat mas mababa pa,” Undersecretary for Trade Victorio Mario A. Dimagiba added.

U.S. TO RETAKE HELM OF GLOBAL ECONOMY Continued from A1

that payrolls rose 252,000 in December as the unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 percent, its lowest level since June 2008. Job growth last month was highlighted by the biggest gain in construction employment in almost a year.

Factories, health-care providers and business services also kept adding to their payrolls.

About 3 million more Americans found work in 2014, the most in 15 years and a sign companies are optimistic US demand will persist even as overseas markets struggle.

US government securities rose after the report as investors focused on a surprise drop in hourly wages last month. Ten-year Treasury yields declined seven basis points to 1.95 percent at 5 p.m. in New York on January 9. Continued on A2

TUNA CAPITAL A man carries a tuna in the port of General Santos City. The province is said to be the tuna capital of the Philippines, where exporting tuna is one of the major businesses. NONIE REYES

‘BSP to continue banking-reform agenda’

T

he robust state of banks across the Philippines has encouraged the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) to plan the introduction of more reforms designed to allow the P10.5-trillion industry to compete on even footing with regional rivals and make them more inclusive for local clients down the line, as well.

The BSP said more banking reforms will be introduced this year as the monetary authorities take advantage of the strong financial position of the local lenders based on the 2014 data.

At a recent speaking engagement, BSP Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr. said that aside from working on monetary stability, the “BSP will continue its banking-reform agenda appropriate to our own operating environment.”

Tetangco said the banking system has

been a source of strength for the Philippine economy because of its sound, stable and liquid state at present and best indicated by the high level of public trust in the system that, in turn, allowed deposits to achieve recordhigh levels last year.

“Overall, our banks have strong balance sheets, solid asset growth, low NPL [nonperforming loan] ratios and above-standard capital adequacy ratios as a result of good governance and adherence to international best practice in risk management,” Tetangco said.

“Indeed, our banks are fully engaged with us in our efforts to help ensure that our system is sound, that its operations are aligned with international standards, and that its reach covers more of the previously unbanked or unserved areas,” he added.

The BSP also vowed to pursue a more

aggressive approach to regulation, aside from the wave of reforms put in place last year.

“These reforms will impact the way banks do business with you. But these are calibrated to enhance the protection of bank clients and to ensure the stability of the financial and the economic system as a whole,” Tetangco said before members of a non-governmental organization on Friday.

While specific reforms were not disclosed, Tetangco previously said the continuing reforms, planned under the Basel 3 Accord, include facets under liquidity and leverage ratios.

The BSP implemented reforms in the second half of last year, including those under capitalization, the handling of systemically important banks and the shift of focus from collateral to the borrowers’ ability to pay. Bianca Cuaresma