Bayan Muna urges probe into LRT ‘sweetheart deal’

MANILA, Philippines — Two party-list lawmakers urged their colleagues in Congress on Tuesday to hasten the inquiry into the alleged “sweetheart deal” in the awarding of the P64.9-billion Light Rail Transit 1 Cavite extension project to a lone bidder.

Bayan Muna Representatives Neri Colmenares and Carlos Zarate said they were not against the development or extension of the LRT but they opposed passing the burden to commuters through fare hikes.

“We are also against sweetheart deals that, to put it in the vernacular, ‘ay ginigisa tayo sa sarili nating mantika (we are being cooked in our own fat)’,” Colmenares said in a Bayan Muna statement.

The Light Rail Manila Consortium (LMRC)— composed of Ayala Corp. Infrastructure Holdings, Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC) and Macquarie Infrastructure Holdings Philippines PTE Ltd.— was recently awarded the rights to the project.

The LMRC earlier said that the proposed fare hike (P11 base fare plus P1 per additional kilometer) was crucial to its ability to get loans to bankroll the project, which would extend the railway by 11.7 kilometer from its Baclaran-Pasay City terminal to Bacoor, Cavite, and boost its total capacity from 500,000 passengers to 800,000 passengers per day.

Bayan Muna had vowed to block the proposed fare hike.

“Yesterday a statement of the MPIC-Ayala group said that the fare hike is a crucial bank requirement to lend them money for the P65 billion project. This again proves that the public-private partnership (PPP) program is nothing but privatization and the cost to finance this is again passed on to commuters,” Colmenares said. “We will do all we can to stop this fare hike.”

Before any fare hike, Zarate said, the high cost of operations and the large amount of debt incurred by the project should first be investigated, specifically on whether taxpayers are actually subsidizing debt incurred by the private consortium that built the MRT or the Metro Rail Transit.

“There is need for government to look into the operational costs of the MRT and LRT lines to check if there might be excessive expenses or mismanagement of funds,” he added.

The Bayan Muna lawmakers, citing a study made by Ibon Foundation, said the LRT 1 is the biggest project auctioned so far by the Aquino administration under its PPP program.

“It is also one of the most controversial because the Aquino government has given greater guarantees and perks than the ‘sweetheart deals’ done by previous administrations, the grave effects of which the public is still paying for to this day,” they said.

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