Davao ‘legally bound’ to pay for Artica Dome

A TOP official said Sunday that Davao City is legally bound to pay the multi-million peso Artica Dome despite the project being highly anomalous and questionable.

Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, in his television program “Gikan sa Masa, Para sa Masa,” said the reason his administration is paying for the P150 million loan the City Government has incurred as a result of the Artica Dome project is that they are legally obliged to do so.

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In November 24, 1999, then Mayor de Benjamin de Guzman acquired a P300 million loan with Land Bank of the Philippines for the Artica project. The loan is payable within 10 years with a 14 percent interest per annum.

Duterte said de Guzman’s administration started the construction of Artica in 2000 with a budget of P228 million for the contractor, Archipelago Builders Construction, and another P10 million for a consultant.

“Davao City is paying because you took out a loan that required Land Bank to pay the contractor. The City Government has to pay because it's a legal obligation and the bank is nowhere at fault. You gave authority to the bank to pay, thus it's not the fault of the bank that you hatched up this deal with Archipelago Builder. Do not try to evade the issue, we are both lawyers, we both know that the city is obliged to pay,” Duterte said in response to de Guzman’s claims that the mere fact the City Government has continually been paying for the project is enough proof that the Artica Dome project is not irregular.

Duterte also said that as of December 15, 2000, only P150 million has been released by Land Bank for the project.

When he assumed office as mayor in 2001, Duterte said he was already aware of the anomaly at Artica Dome construction, prompting him to create a task force on September 23, 2003 to investigate.

He said the result of the investigation showed that the dome sits on a fault line, is very near a ravine and that the construction materials used were substandard.

“Ang mga poste hiwi pud. Lousy gyud pagkabuhat (The posts are crooked. The construction work is lousy),” Duterte said of the Artica.

With this, Mayor Duterte said he decided not to continue the project and just make it instead a monument of De Guzman’s corrupt administration.

The mayor said the City Government will complete its payment of the loan by July 18, 2010.

It was learned that the principal amount of the loan was P135.937 million and an interest of P74.7 million. The city has a remaining balance of P40.62 million that has to be paid middle of this year.

Duterte warned de Guzman, who is running against him for the vice mayoral race come May 2010, that he will soon make it public how the former mayor enriched himself as soon as he assumed the mayoral post in 1998 until 2001.