INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — A House committee conducting an investigation into the recent spike in onion prices has cited for contempt two more officials from a second cold storage firm for refusing to submit relevant documents and making conflicting statements.
During a nearly nine-hour hearing on Tuesday, 20 members of the House agriculture and food committee voted to cite in contempt George Ong and Michael Ang of Super Five Cold Storage. They were later escorted to a detention facility within the House of Representatives where they would be detained for 10 days as ordered by the panel.
The motion to cite both for contempt was made by the committee’s vice chair, Quezon Rep. David Suarez, who cited the exchange between the two Super Five officials and Marikina Rep. Stella Luz Quimbo, House appropriations committee senior vice chair.
“She asked, ‘Are you involved in trading?’ and they said categorically ‘No.’ And when the name of a company involved in trading was mentioned, they admitted that [Ang] was a part of that company. That’s lying before this committee,” Suarez said.
The cold storage officials were also questioned for submitting documents about their clients and inventory that were lacking in details.
“They claimed not to know what’s happening inside their facility…. Do you think this is sufficient? This is insulting. Then they say they don’t know how much their profits are. Maybe they can’t compute it because they are earning [a lot]. There is enough basis for us to find them worthy to be cited in contempt,” Suarez said.
Presence not enough
Ong and Ang, through their legal counsel, tried to appeal for reconsideration to committee members by assuring them that they would submit a detailed list of their clients and inventory at the next hearing.
They pointed out that unlike previous resource persons who were cited in contempt for snubbing the committee, they showed up at the hearing.
However, House natural resources committee chair Rep. Elpidio Barzaga Jr. said that their mere presence was not enough.
“Your appearance does not mean that you cannot be cited for contempt. Before you were asked questions, you took an oath and in that oath you were asked, ‘Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?’ and you [swore], ‘Yes.’ So much so, that if you will not be telling the truth, although you are present and you have submitted the documents, there will be a legal basis for citing a person in contempt, whom we consider [as] not telling the truth,” Barzaga said.
During the hearing, Quimbo noted that cold storage facilities in the country were limited and could control the supply of local and imported red onions.
“If the controlled local production and importation is stored in a few storage facilities and is released in limited amounts [into] the market, there is an artificial rise in the prices of onion. This is a clear case of hoarding and price manipulation,” she said.
Earlier detainees
On March 7, the House committee cited for contempt three officials of another cold storage firm, Argo Trading, for refusing to submit the inventory of the onions stored in their facility in 2022. They were ordered detained for 10 days.
But only the company’s operations manager, John Patrick Sevilla, ended up in detention because president and general manager Efren Zoleta Jr. and legal counsel Jan Ryan Cruz failed to appear before the committee.
Zoleta and Cruz surrendered voluntarily on March 13 and were detained briefly. The contempt order against the three officials was eventually lifted after they gave satisfactory explanations to the House panel.
Onion prices started rising in the latter part of 2022, hitting P280 to P300 per kilogram in November against the suggested price cap of P170 set by the Department of Agriculture (DA).
By December, the price had climbed to P600 a kilogram in some public markets, prompting the DA to authorize the importation of 21,060 metric tons (MT) of red and yellow onions the following month as a “temporary, short-term” solution to bring prices down.
Although onion prices have considerably gone down since then, the Philippine Onion Industry Roadmap 2021-2025 said that the country would have to increase its onion production from 229,539 MT to 279,270 MT to achieve self-sufficiency by 2025.