Wenceslao: Killing South Road Properties' potentials

Bong O. Wenceslao

THE controversy over the Cebu City Government’s deal with Filinvest Land Inc. to develop a portion of the South Road Properties (SRP) has just gotten interesting, what with Capitol firing questions at will from the trenches. The biggest offensive would definitely be the House inquiry that Rep. Pablo John Garcia is preparing.

Let us see how a City Hall with “only” Acting Mayor Michael Rama (Mayor Tomas Osmeña is set to go back to the United States for surgery) at the helm would counter that assault. Will Reps. Raul del Mar and Antonio Cuenco man the ramparts in Osmeña’s defense by blocking the initiative at the House of Representatives?

I won’t dwell on who got the commission from the transaction. I would leave that to Bobby Nalzaro who has been harping on the issue in his columns and commentaries for days now. Commissions, even if they run to millions of pesos, are difficult to expose simply because those involved have the ability of cats.



The past days, there has been this odor emanating from somewhere in our kitchen. Which reminded me of my lola, Nanay Bunding (may her soul rest in peace), who used to punish our cat each time it leaves its excreta inside our house. Nay Bunding it was who told us city-bred kids about the special talent of cats: hiding the evidence of the crime.

Both the giver and the receiver of commissions (or in the terminology of the corrupt, SOP) are legally liable for the act, thus the tendency to clam up. In the end, what is left for the public to pick up from the crime scene are rumors and hearsay evidence, which is akin to the smell emanating from well-hidden cat excreta.

What caught my interest in Capitol’s tirade against the City Hall-Filinvest “joint venture” is the project’s development thrust, the same point I raised when the agreement was not yet signed. (The phrase joint venture is in quotation mark because there is logic in the contention that the agreement sounds more like a sale, with Filinvest given the sole authority to decide on what to do with the lots.)

Section 1 (b) of the agreement partly states that, “Filinvest and Cebu City shall jointly develop the Joint Development Properties into an integrated and well-planned clusters of medium rise residential buildings and retirement and congregate care complexes with adequate and necessary public infrastructure that includes roads, public utility networks and sewage system.”

After all the hassles the city and its residents have gone through in constructing this prime piece of property, including the diversion of money intended for basic services to the payment of the SRP loan, and we get only this: another subdivision area? No wonder a Japanese consultant chided the Filinvest project as having “low potentials for job generation.”

Why the haste in inking the deal with Filinvest when the city could have put the SRP to a better use (as an industrial or commercial site) had it waited for better deals later? Selling the SRP to the SM group, for example, would have been much better considering its expertise in developing sites for commerce. Turning a big chunk of the SRP into a subdivision is to kill the land’s potentials, making the area moribund.

Mayor Osmeña boasted often that the SRP is his baby. It now looks like the welfare of this baby is of lesser concern to the father than his own interest.