MANILA, Philippines—A week after paralyzing their Manila port operations, businessmen protesting the city’s expanded daytime truck ban are counting on a big “client” and one of the country’s richest men to help them convince former President and now Mayor Joseph Estrada to change his mind about the traffic scheme.
“We are waiting for Lucio Tan to call us for a meeting,” said Mary Zapata, president of the Aduana Business Club Inc. (ABCI), which staged what it called a stakeholders’ holiday at the Manila International Container Terminal (MICT).
Zapata said a meeting held Tuesday between Estrada and an emissary of Tan from the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry Inc. (FCCCII), which is helping the ABCI on the issue, produced “no breakthroughs.”
Tan is the president emeritus of FCCCII. The tycoon, whose business empire includes interests in the airline, banking, tobacco and real estate industries, supported Estrada in his rise to the presidency, but the two men had a falling-out in the years leading to Estrada’s ouster in 2001.
According to Zapata, “Tan is our (trucking) client and he has a lot of cargoes being held up in the port.”
ABCI and other trucking groups maintain that the two-month-old traffic scheme has been hurting their operations and those of the companies they serve. They have since staged strikes calling on the national government to intervene.
As of Monday, MICT has reached “99-percent yard utilization,” meaning the holding area was nearing full capacity, according to Reynaldo Soliman, executive vice president of the Professional Customs Brokers Association of the Philippines.
At least 11 vessels had been prevented from unloading and forced to wait outside the breakwater, Soliman said, quoting an update from the Association of International Shipping Lines.
Asked about the meeting with Tan’s emissary from FCCCII, Estrada said: “We’re still studying it. We have to balance things. (The ban) may have affected them but it has also benefited so many people—students, teachers, employees.”
As to the situation at the Manila port, “I think the national government should do something about it,” Estrada said. “We have the Batangas and Subic ports, they have spent money on it. The national government should direct (cargo haulers) to use these ports.”
In a statement, Manila Vice Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso said the City Hall had “already acceded to most, if not all (the truckers’) requests,” like when it allowed “window hours” from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“They are the ones who should be held liable for economic sabotage,” Domagoso said. “We all have to make sacrifices to ease the burden commuters and motorists are experiencing. The worst is actually yet to come (with the) construction of Skyway 3.”