CLARK FREEPORT—The president of the Clark International Airport Corp. (CIAC) has taken an indefinite leave of absence shortly after an official of the state-owned firm linked him to the alleged theft of cables that comprised the backup electrical system of the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport (DMIA) here.
The leave taken by CIAC president Victor Jose Luciano starts today (Monday), an Inquirer source at the CIAC human resource office said.
Reached to confirm the information, lawyer Felipe Antonio Remollo, acting CIAC chair, said Luciano filed the leave on Friday.
Luciano did not reply when asked why he went on leave. Earlier, he denied that the cables were stolen, insisting that DMIA was safe and secured, and its power cables intact and upgraded.
Remollo said he has created a three-member ad hoc committee to investigate the issue.
Luciano’s leave and the investigation came after Reynaldo Catacutan, vice president for airport operations management group, released documents to the Inquirer showing that Luciano secured passes for four men who turned up to be the theft suspects.
The suspects are employees of the ACP Manpower whose owner, Josie Gomez, was sued together with Luciano last year over alleged missing scrap metal salvaged from 16 buildings left by the United States Air Force in Clark in 1991. The case, filed by Candaba Mayor Jerry Pelayo, who leased two of the buildings, is pending at the Office of the Ombudsman.
Letter
Among the documents provided by Catacutan on the missing power cables was an undated handwritten letter by Luciano to the security department to give passes to the four men “to do ground maintenance of Blocker 4 Area” on condition their background was checked.
The documents also included an Aug. 5 memorandum by property and procurement manager Silverio Clemente, who cited “verbal instructions” of Luciano to request a 30-day access pass for the four men and two others, and Luciano’s Sept. 5 handwritten letter asking a Taiwanese farmer to allow the three suspects and a man to “assist in clearing work” in his area, which is at the perimeter of the airfield.
The subject of a Sept. 9 memorandum of Ruel Angeles, engineering and maintenance manager, was on the “missing high voltage power cable along Runway 02R/20L and Taxiway F5.”
Angeles said a “field inventory conducted by our electrical maintenance section on the underground distribution systems at the airfield resulted in the discovery of missing high voltage XLPE 15 [kilovolts] power cable.” Gone were 2,195 meters of cables worth P2.655 million, he said.
A Sept. 9 memorandum by Jose Marlowe Pedregosa, airport security manager, said the suspects “conducted ‘ground maintenance’ at the aerodrome without the knowledge of the aviation engineering department [AED].”
Their acts were “tantamount to pilferage/theft,” said Pedregosa who also recommended “legal actions” on the four men either by “civil/criminal prosecution.”
As of last week, no complaint had been filed against the suspects or Gomez.
But on Friday, Angeles and Pedregosa issued “clarifications,” indicating they reversed the information they cited during the investigation.