These sum up the allegations cited by the advocacy group Pinoy Gumising Ka Movement (PGKM) in its letters of complaint over the weekend to the Commission on Audit (COA) and the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR).
The subject of the complaints is the annual Clark hot air balloon festival organized by Capt. Joi Roa under his Philippine International Hot Air Balloon Foundation (PIHABF).
“For the past 15 years, [Clark Development Corp. and Clark International Airport Corp.] have been subsidizing the balloon festival in millions of pesos, which since 2009 is pegged at P3.5 million per annum,” said the letter addressed to COA Chairman Michael G. Aguinaldo and signed by Ruperto L. Cruz, PGKM chair.
Cruz noted that: “Given the number of years that CDC and CIAC have been engaged in this practice, the amount of unliquidated and unaudited public funds released to Roa would be substantial.”
Perceived by the PGKM “as highly anomalous is that the CDC and CIAC subsidy comes from public funds but is not subjected to liquidation and auditing processes.
This, aside from possible violation of the law that forbids government subsidy to purely private commercial enterprises.”
The PGKM appealed to Aguinaldo “to please commence an investigation in this regard.”
Cash crop
In the letter to BIR Commissioner Kim Henares also signed by Cruz, the PGKM again cited the subsidy given to Roa’s foundation by the two government corporations. “For BIR purposes,” however, the PGKM pointed to “the gate receipts, parking fees, stall rentals, corporate sponsorships generated by the balloon festival which accrue directly and solely to Roa’s PIHABF.”
Said the letter: “Consider that in 2009, per a CDC unofficial, and therefore hidden, report, 49,638 tickets worth at least P100 each were sold, and 5,735 vehicles parked in the designated P50-for-cars, P100- for-buses parking areas during the four-day period. Truly, immense cash crop there already reaped by Roa. And we did not even count the stall areas, going at an average of P17,000 per, and the even pricier corporate sponsorships!”
Continued the letter: “In its last edition just last February, it was reported that the hot air balloon festival drew some 200,000 spectators. At the price of P300 per ticket, that would already amount to a staggering P60 million. Rentals have reportedly been raised to an average of P25,000, as well as the parking fees to P100 and P200.”
“We believe the income generated by the hot air balloon festival for Roa’s PIHABF is worth looking into by your good office,” concluded the letter to Henares.
Calls to the CDC President-CEO Arthur Tugade and CIAC President- CEO Emigdio Tanjuatco III for their side of the issue remained unreturned until presstime.
