University of Makati nursing building overpriced by P500M—lawyer

Atty. Renato Bondal INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Citing own computations, lawyer Renato Bondal told a Senate hearing on Monday that the nursing building in the University of Makati (UMak) was overpriced by more than P500 million.

During last week’s hearing of the Senate blue-ribbon subcommittee hearing, its chairman, Senator Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III asked Bondal to substantiate his allegations that the nursing building was overpriced and Vice President Jejomar Binay made money from it when he was still the mayor of Makati City.

On Wednesday last week, Pimentel directed Bondal to substantiate his allegations.

Again using a slideshow, Bondal said the 12-floor nursing building, also called Health and Physical Sciences Building, was provided P1.5 billion allocation when, he said, it appears it only cost P1.2 billion.

But when he compared the cost of construction with Shang Grand Tower in Makati City, the lawyer said his computation showed the nursing building was overpriced by P579.4 million.

Bondal said the price of Shang Grand Tower per square meter was only P26, 277 while UMak’s nursing building was P44, 531.

“Alam nyo po kaninang umaga, bago tayo mag hearing, nagkakape po kami ng aming expert na si Engineer Federico Cuervo, at noon pang aming nirere-compute kanina, mas mataas pa ang lumabas na naging deperensya ng proyektong ito. (This morning prior to the hearing, we had coffee with Engineer Federico Cuervo. When we computed it, it turned out this project has a big margin of difference),” he told the subcommittee.

He said his initial computation showed that the building was overpriced with P467.3 million. But when they had another computation, the cost of the overpriced amount, he said, would even reach about half a billion pesos.

“Ayan po, ang lumalabas sa aming initial computation na P579.4 million ang naging

overpriced dyan po sa proyekto ng gusaling yan, ng Makati Nursing Building sa loob po ng University of Makati,” said the lawyer.

Bondal also maintained that a joint venture agreement the Makati government and UMak had entered into with the Systems Technology Institute (STI) to establish the Philippine Healthcare Educators Inc. (PHEI) that will operate the College of Nursing, was anomalous.

Tomas Lopez and other officials of PHEI were present in the hearing to deny the allegation. TVJ

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