There are still a few of municipal bond floats in Mindanao, but unfortunately reports said that most of these projects are a failure turning involved LGUs to being saddled with unnecessary obligations and debts.
Nabunturan sources who went on study tour to Malaybalay, Bukidnon said that the Malaybalay’s own bond float was a big failure as the local government made a buy-back option by resorting to bank borrowing just to stop the high financing costs of the bond flotation on the running.
For having allegedly malversed proceeds from municipal housing bond flotation just in a year’s time after it took off, former Misamis Oriental Governor Antonio Calingin, then the town mayor of Claveria in the province, was haled to court resulting to his conviction from 47 graft and criminal cases filed at him in connection to the bond float. His cases included an alleged cornering by his brother of the rentals of heavy equipment used in the construction of the housing project. In this bond float, proceeds from the housing project did not manage to reach fifty percent of the bonds floated resulting to the net loss of the project which was inherited by the administration next to Calingin’s.
There was not even a single investor in Aklan province which floated bonds in 2000 for its jetty port and terminal building to support the world famous Boracay Island. Both the Claveria and Aklan bond floats were brokered by Preferred Ventures Corp., the current financial adviser-consultant in Nabunturan bond float.
A councilor now disclosed that during the study tour of the majority of sanggunian members to Congress early this year they made a side trip to Calatagan, Batangas, where another municipal bond float was made, and saw for themselves a largely idle new public market building with a lot of unoccupied stalls and spaces. The building is the reason of the town’s bond float which was brokered by the same Preferred Ventures.
The side story of this side trip was that the Preferred Ventures had accordingly “accommodated (the SB members) well” there. That at a time they were still in the thick of deliberation on whether to approve the feasibility study for the Nabunturan bond float, the document whose approval could finally lay the legal grounds for the ambitious project of Mayor Humol.
There is it, from these cases, we find upfront the impracticality, unpopularity if not non-doability of the municipal bond flotation, and at its rear-end its extravagance, wastage of governmental resources and corruption that put the government in disadvantageous and losing end. (For my online edition, visit my blog at: http://cha4t.wordpress.com)
