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AYALA
Land Inc. (ALI) will allot a larger capital expenditure
this year to fund its residential, mall and office
developments.
“Our capex this year will definitely be
higher than the P16.2 billion we set in 2007,” said
chief finance officer Jaime Ysmael in an interview late
Tuesday. He said the final budget for the year will be
determined next month.
The company started with the 10-year
redevelopment program of Glorietta, including the
building of Glorietta-5, which will assign three floors
to retail space and five floors to accommodate business
process outsourcing firms.
He said the plan is to transfer tenants
affected by the Glorietta-2 blast to Glorietta-5.
Ysmael, meanwhile, said the company is
prepared to face results of the probe by Philippine
National Police, or PNP, into the October blast that
killed 11 people and injured 112 others.
“We are prepared to face whatever
findings they will come out with. We also did our own
investigation and we will come out with our own
[findings],” he said.
The PNP earlier said the explosion in
Glorrieta-2 mall was caused by methane in the mall’s
septic tank, not a terrorist bomb attack. A final
investigation will be released by the PNP today.
But ALI said it was highly unlikely that
methane would have developed in the basement sump of
Glorietta 2’s MSC building as conditions for methane to
have been produced in substantial quantities were not
present.
Likewise, the accumulation of biogas in
the basement is unlikely because it would have vented
via a large open stairwell that leads to the delivery
bay. Biogas is about 20-percent less dense than air
depending on the methane content of the gas.
“The focus of what has been coming out
in the media is on the methane and diesel theories. So
the focus of our particular investigation was zeroed in
on those. At this point in time, together with our
foreign experts, [we] say that it is highly unlikely
that there would have been sufficient methane in order
to cause this kind of blast and at the same time the
diesel tank itself is not the primary source of this
kind of damage,” said ALI president Jaime Ayala in a
previous interview.
The experts he was referring to included
a Dr. Stephen Etheridge— wastewater and effluent
treatment specialist with special expertise on biogas
production—and Burgoynes, an international consulting
firm that specializes in forensic investigation of
fires, explosions, and engineering failures,
Further citing the experts’ findings,
Ayala said it was unlikely that a gas explosion in the
basement would have caused severe damage in the loading
bay area because the loading bay was open to the street
when the explosion occurred. |
