CEBU City Mayor Tomas Osmeña calls the New Year “crucial” for three reasons: (1) the peace and order condition, (2) the announcement that he’d start moves after the Sinulog to void the sale of South Road Properties (SRP) land to three giant companies doing business in the city, and (3) his decision to close some banks for alleged under-payment of taxes.
The local buzz is more on the second, as the suspicion is on motive, which arouses more interest.
Why does he want to break a contract that has already been partly paid and executed? The P15.76 billion deal over 45.2 hectares of SRP land was closed last July 21, 2015.
The move against the consortium would go through phases: First, the approval of the City Council to sue, or in its stead, the approval of voters in an initiative/referendum. Then, the filing of the lawsuit, a litigation can take years, from the Regional Trial Court to the Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court.
The case might even survive the litigants and drag the next mayor and the defendants’ estate and heirs to it.
Tomas might resort to the initiative with referendum if he cannot woo enough councilors to shift council control to BOPK or, failing that, replace hostile legislators with his own by recall election.
But recall can’t be held until after one year from last May and before the last year of the local officials’ three-year term. And he can’t be sure if his bets would win.
But the mayor during litigation might be able to release facts that would influence public opinion, that is, the city got a bad deal and grounds for fraud existed. So far, Tomas has not shown anything to support his general allegation that the contract was a product of corruption.
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Tough on monkey business
Mayor Tomas’s plan to close banks suspected of not having paid the right amount of taxes to the city is sensitive.
Banks are among the businesses whose credibility can’t be tainted with suspicion of cheating. Tomas’s action might set off a run on the banks concerned.
That could prompt the banks to quietly settle -- or fight ferociously back. And what message would that give other enterprises?
Cebu City could get the reputation of being unfriendly to business or just being tough on monkey business. A balancing act for City Hall as a number of business executives may not make that distinction.
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Shift in drug war
Press Secretary Martin Andanar through the local P.I.A. said the drug campaign will shift from the security to its health component.
That may mean slowdown or end to the killings and focusing on the surrenderers, which he says, totaled 1,007,153 people (from July to December, 2016). Crime rate has been reduced by 32%, he reports. Were the illegal executions included in the crime stats?
[bzzzzz@sunstar.com.ph or paseares@gmail.com]