Magic in the sand
MONEY MATTERS, indeed, but quite short in exploring all the details.
So was my friend Buru’s immediate reaction to the piece here yesterday. Buru is an old hand in the quarry business, pre-dating even the lamented Porac Mayor Roy David, the acknowledged lahar fighter at the time of the Pinatubo eruptions, and the undisputed quarry master in the aftermath.
So where did I fall short, I asked Buru over espresso at Starbucks, SM City Clark.
In the SMC. The Suretrux Management and Consultancy company you mentioned merely in passing when it is the very cause of the internal strife at the FPTI (Federation of Pampanga Trucker, Inc.), and, more importantly, is poised to the trigger the new plunder of Pampanga’s prized jewel.
How?
Mike Tapang was ousted as FPTI president due to what his own members said was his “unrelenting proposal for an outside management and consultancy company to manage the whole operations and all the affairs of the federation.”
Yeah, I wrote that exactly.
Okay, that company is SMC.
Yes, I wrote that too. And SMC is not acceptable to FPTI because of what the members said was “demands of the management company for fees that we found to be unreasonable beyond logical proportion and without any accounting records for such an undertaking.” I even made fun of the redundancies there.
Yeah, funnier still is that you did not write of the demands.
Okay, I really fouled out there.
The proposal of Tapang, as laid out to me by the truckers I talked to, was that SMC would virtually control all sand trucking and hauling operations in Pampanga for a fee of P20 per cubic meter of sand hauled. Work out your math now, calculate how much SMC would amass.
I am good only with words. My affair with numbers ended in high school.
Okay, with the total load capacity of the close to 3,000 sand haulers plying the quarry sites daily, that P20 per cubic meter easily translates to P1.5 million per day.
Why, that’s bigger than the P1 million a day quarry collection by the capitol!
Correction, times two of the now P700,000 plus daily quarry take.
Boggling. But can this work?
Of course it can. It has been done in the past. Not on a per cubic meter, but on a per truck computation, er...imposition. Sometime in 1998, the quarry operations in the province were divided into three main spheres with their respective overlords who were close associates if not relatives of the capitol tenants. The quarry stakeholders – truckers, operators, owners of quarry sites were organized into associations and told to collect, over the then capitol tax of P40 per truckload of sand, an additional P120 per truck as “management fee.”
Yes, I remember. That set-up triggered the raid on the quarry sites by agents of the NBI and climaxed to the suspension from office of the governor and vice governor with the filing of graft cases against them by the Ombudsman.
So you remember.
Very well, yes. But the so called plunder of the quarry collection in the past would look like raiding a piggy bank compared to what this new scheme would bring about.
So you discern some patterns?
Tapang as the overlord of this new management scheme. Possible. But he could not do it alone. As the experience of the past showed. For all those highly visible upfront, a shady somebody pulls the strings from some place higher.
So who is stubbornly thwarting all the moves of the FPTI to get Tapang out of the task force group on Ordinance 261? Whose name was all splashed in those streamers the truckers held in their protest march to the capitol last Monday?
Oh, I missed that.
It’s your favorite whipping person, that’s who. Okay, so what do you think is the hidden meaning of SMC?
As it is said to stand for Suretrux Marketing Consultancy...then, that could only be San Miguel Corp. Yes, San Miguel had some stakes in the Porac sand with its bottle-making company in Mancatian before its devastation by Pinatubo, right?
Wrong. SMC stands for Salamangka ng Magkasuyo sa Capitolyo (Magic by the Partners at the Capitol).
Yeah, after the miracle in the quarry collection where millions materialized out of the sand, comes now the magic a la David Copperfield. The disappearing act, that is.
So was my friend Buru’s immediate reaction to the piece here yesterday. Buru is an old hand in the quarry business, pre-dating even the lamented Porac Mayor Roy David, the acknowledged lahar fighter at the time of the Pinatubo eruptions, and the undisputed quarry master in the aftermath.
So where did I fall short, I asked Buru over espresso at Starbucks, SM City Clark.
In the SMC. The Suretrux Management and Consultancy company you mentioned merely in passing when it is the very cause of the internal strife at the FPTI (Federation of Pampanga Trucker, Inc.), and, more importantly, is poised to the trigger the new plunder of Pampanga’s prized jewel.
How?
Mike Tapang was ousted as FPTI president due to what his own members said was his “unrelenting proposal for an outside management and consultancy company to manage the whole operations and all the affairs of the federation.”
Yeah, I wrote that exactly.
Okay, that company is SMC.
Yes, I wrote that too. And SMC is not acceptable to FPTI because of what the members said was “demands of the management company for fees that we found to be unreasonable beyond logical proportion and without any accounting records for such an undertaking.” I even made fun of the redundancies there.
Yeah, funnier still is that you did not write of the demands.
Okay, I really fouled out there.
The proposal of Tapang, as laid out to me by the truckers I talked to, was that SMC would virtually control all sand trucking and hauling operations in Pampanga for a fee of P20 per cubic meter of sand hauled. Work out your math now, calculate how much SMC would amass.
I am good only with words. My affair with numbers ended in high school.
Okay, with the total load capacity of the close to 3,000 sand haulers plying the quarry sites daily, that P20 per cubic meter easily translates to P1.5 million per day.
Why, that’s bigger than the P1 million a day quarry collection by the capitol!
Correction, times two of the now P700,000 plus daily quarry take.
Boggling. But can this work?
Of course it can. It has been done in the past. Not on a per cubic meter, but on a per truck computation, er...imposition. Sometime in 1998, the quarry operations in the province were divided into three main spheres with their respective overlords who were close associates if not relatives of the capitol tenants. The quarry stakeholders – truckers, operators, owners of quarry sites were organized into associations and told to collect, over the then capitol tax of P40 per truckload of sand, an additional P120 per truck as “management fee.”
Yes, I remember. That set-up triggered the raid on the quarry sites by agents of the NBI and climaxed to the suspension from office of the governor and vice governor with the filing of graft cases against them by the Ombudsman.
So you remember.
Very well, yes. But the so called plunder of the quarry collection in the past would look like raiding a piggy bank compared to what this new scheme would bring about.
So you discern some patterns?
Tapang as the overlord of this new management scheme. Possible. But he could not do it alone. As the experience of the past showed. For all those highly visible upfront, a shady somebody pulls the strings from some place higher.
So who is stubbornly thwarting all the moves of the FPTI to get Tapang out of the task force group on Ordinance 261? Whose name was all splashed in those streamers the truckers held in their protest march to the capitol last Monday?
Oh, I missed that.
It’s your favorite whipping person, that’s who. Okay, so what do you think is the hidden meaning of SMC?
As it is said to stand for Suretrux Marketing Consultancy...then, that could only be San Miguel Corp. Yes, San Miguel had some stakes in the Porac sand with its bottle-making company in Mancatian before its devastation by Pinatubo, right?
Wrong. SMC stands for Salamangka ng Magkasuyo sa Capitolyo (Magic by the Partners at the Capitol).
Yeah, after the miracle in the quarry collection where millions materialized out of the sand, comes now the magic a la David Copperfield. The disappearing act, that is.
posted by A.Caesar Z. Lacson at 1:28 PM
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