Jai alai firm owner hits back at Robredo
The head of the foreign gaming firm that operates the jai alai games at the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (Ceza) on Wednesday expressed frustration over what he said was the Philippine government’s failure “to offer protection for legitimate businesses.”
In an e-mailed statement, Meridien Vista Gaming Corp. president Aitor Totoricaguena also denounced Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo for ordering the closure of all jai alai betting centers outside the Cagayan free port.
Robredo and Justice Secretary Leila de Lima last week issued the order to law enforcers to close down the betting centers and arrest the people running them.
“We don’t know what happened to the good secretary, but imagine its effects on legitimate investors like us,” Totoricaguena lamented.
He recalled that Robredo, when he was still mayor of Naga City, had issued a business permit for an off-fronton betting station in the city.
Totoricaguena said Robredo’s grant of a business permit to the off-fronton betting station in Naga only showed that the former mayor “found the operations of (Meridien) acceptable.”
Totoricaguena, a Spanish national, also assailed insinuations that Charlie “Atong” Ang, a former gambling buddy of deposed president and convicted plunderer Joseph Estrada, owned the gaming firm.
Unrelenting campaign
The “unrelenting and erroneous campaign to link” Meridien to Ang was “a classic example of how legitimate business operators are at risk of an unstable investment environment,” Totoricaguena said.
Totoricaguena said the attack on Meridienn was “being shaped by biases and baseless conclusions of officials with no regard for reputations and their actions’ effects on the Philippine business climate.”
“We are investors in the Philippines who wish to do business legally but why are we being pilloried?” Totoricaguena said.
“We have followed the law and have run to the Philippine judicial system for legal recourse in the ongoing campaign to raze us to the ground by officials who can’t seem to respect the courts,” he added.
According to Totoricaguena, Ang, who owned and run a jai alai business during the Estrada administration, had been hired as a consultant “at the inception” of Meridien’s operations.
Ang’s involvement in the gaming firm was “limited to consultancy for his expertise in the technical aspects of the game and has since ended,” Totoricaguena said.
