- Duterte slammed Lopez group for written-off loans.
- Duterte issued fresh tirades against the Lopez Group
President Rodrigo Duterte launched fresh attacks against the Lopez Group of Companies.
In a speech at Malacanang, Tuesday, September 17, the President slammed the Lopez group for allegedly not paying their loans to government-owned Development Bank of the Philippines.
“The Lopez group of companies never paid a single centavo. It was condoned by the government. Who condoned it, who authorized it, I really don’t know, but maybe one of these days I’ll start to dig,” said Duterte.
In 2006, the DBP wrote off an estimated P1.67 billion in loans given to several Lopez-owned companies according to a report by Inquirer.net.
Of the 1.67 billion in loans, P710 million came from Maynilad Water Services Inc, P591 million from Bayan Telecommunications, P207 million from Central CATV Inc, and P157 million from Benpres Holdings Inc. But these loans comprised only 17% of the total 9.56 billion in loans written off by DBP from more than 700 companies.
DBP’s power to write off loans was based on the Special Purpose Vehicle Law of 2002. The law allowed the financial institutions to get rid of non-performing assets or bad loans for liquidity creation.
Aside from lashing out about the Lopez groups’ loans, Duterte didn’t spare the conglomerate’s media company. The Lopez group owns ABS-CBN and formerly the newspaper Manila Chronicle.
The President again slammed the media giant’s supposedly biased reporting.
“Why do you have to give away money to people who are rich? Tapos mag-publish ng newspaper, with all their protestation and all their grievances for the poor. It’s hypocrisy,” Duterte said.
Duterte, on many occasions, has threatened to block ABS-CBN’s franchise renewal. Although recently, Presidential Spokesman Sal Panelo and PCOO Secretary Martin Andanar both said that the President has no plans to block the network’s renewal, this new tirade from the President brought back the threat to the media giant.
ABS-CBN’s franchise is set to expire in March 2020. Currently, three bills have been filed in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate which seeks to give ABS-CBN another 25-year license to operate.
