Transportation Sec. Arthur Tugade, former CDC president and topnotch classmate of Pres. Duterte at the San Beda College law school, said he has canceled a plan to bid out the construction of a more modern passenger terminal and other rehabilitation plans at the Clark International Airport.
He said his department will instead build the terminal as designed by the Aeroport de Paris during the Aquino administration which he had served at the CDC.
Online news reports quoted him as saying that “if it’s bidding, what do you think will happen if a lot of investors want to participate? It will just prolong the development. That is why we will just do it ourselves. We could just bid out the operations and maintenance of the airport in the future.”
Tugade’s statement was reminiscent of the construction of various projects worth some P137 million here in 2015 when he was still CDC president. The projects, meant to be finished for conferences of the Asia-Pacific Cooperation Summit in the freeport, were rushed with contractors under a contract that provided for secrecy.
The projects then included a 48-seater theatre capable of producing “wind, smoke, bubble, water shots, leg and back seat tickler with three-axes motion for realistic film showing,” or so said a press release from the CDC. The total fund was also used for a P13.85 million 4-D film about the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo titled “Risen from the Ashes.”
Tugade’s announcement on the government construction of the Paris-designed terminal here was a turnaround from his statement two months into the DOTr that he would let the private sector do the project.
This attracted the consortium of Megawide Construction Corp. and Bangalore-based airport operator GMR Infrastructure Limited to submit its P250-billion plan to do the terminal project and other rehabilitation works. The consortium clashed interest with the group of Filinvest Development Corp. and JG Summit Holdings Incorporated’s lower P187-billion proposal for Clark airport. The proposals were unsolicited.
It will be recalled that in the last months of Tugade at the CDC, many were taken by surprise by reports that Filinvest would take over management and operation of the controversial Mimosa Leisure Estate at Clark freeport. The estate is now indeed being run by Filinvest.
Over the Clark airport project, the Megawide group raised concerns after former DOTr undersecretary for aviation Roberto Lim said that the consortium’s Clark airport proposal was “discontinued” because the government was not yet accepting unsolicited proposals.
“We’ll just tell them (their proposals were rejected). I don’t like rejecting as if I am a regulator. As a transportation secretary, I always talk to them (private sector). Discussion is key so we prevent bad situations. That has always been my style,” Tugade was quoted to have said.
The past administration had approved the proposed new terminal at Clark airport, with Congress committed to provide funding for the project every year in the general appropriations.
For 2016, Congress had allocated P800 million for the new Clark terminal project and another P2.1 billion for 2017. So far, however, the DOTr has released only P6.6 million from the total P2.9 billion already allocated in the general appropriations for the project.
