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ZTE Co.
of China has served notice it will not attend ongoing
Senate hearings on the controversial national broadband
network (NBN) project, saying it would rather seek
redress of grievance before the “proper juridical
bodies.”
“ZTE
cannot allow itself to be dragged into any political
circus,” said the company in a statement.
ZTE said
the ongoing Senate hearings are turning away foreign
investors and are damaging bilateral Philippine-Chinese
trade relations.
“It will
not only play down the confidence of companies from
China but also those from other countries to invest in
the
Philippines,”
ZTE said.
It
pointed out that these unfair charges against the
Chinese firm have brought unforeseeable negative
influence on bilateral economic cooperation between
China and the Philippines.
“So far,
every project undertaken by Chinese companies has been
put into inequitable suspicion, including the
agricultural, tele-education, railways, power plant and
elevated highway projects,” it said.
Senate
witnesses Jose de Venecia III and Rodolfo Noel Lozada
Jr. have alleged that the company bribed administration
officials with multimillion-dollar kickbacks to bag the
$329-million NBN deal. They also linked the President’s
husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, to the alleged anomaly.
“ZTE has
neither done anything wrong nor has it bribed anyone to
get this project. The ZTE-NBN proposal stands on its own
merit as sufficiently and ably defended by the DOTC
[Department of Transportation and Communications] before
the investigation of the Senate blue-ribbon committee,”
ZTE added.
As a
company partly owned by the Chinese government, which
ZTE said does not countenance any form of corruption,
the company described allegations against the NBN
contract as “sordid but unsubstantiated.”
The
company also rebutted the claims of Lozada and de
Venecia III that the contract price was increased
allegedly to accommodate bribes.
“Mr.
Lozada has no direct relation with ZTE Corp. ZTE’s
proposal changed because it was required to cover the
whole nation [from the original proposal of only 30
percent coverage]. We have no doubt that any independent
review panel—not the one convened by losing NBN
proponent Mr. Jose de Venecia III—can cut through the
speculations, half-truths and disinformation,” said ZTE.
It said
one only has to look at its comprehensive, itemized and
priced bill of deliverables to determine the falsity of
the charges that the contract was overpriced.
ZTE
maintained that the project was not overpriced.
“An
independent and unbiased panel would see the ZTE
proposal for what it is: a multimillion-dollar project
showcasing ZTE’s state-of-the-art technologies backed by
hundreds of international patents; a project that would
have [been] made more affordable to the Philippine
government through a government-to-government loan
facility with a low interest rate of 3 percent and a
drawn-out repayment period of 20 years, marked by a
grace period of five years,” it added.
From a
coverage of 30 percent priced at $262 million, the NBN
contract was finalized at $329 million for a 100-percent
coverage of the government’s communications needs, it
explained.
ZTE said
it would have delivered a nationwide coverage from the
national government to local government units, ranging
from tier-one cities to tier- six barangays; or 17
districts, 81 provinces, 2,295 central government agents
and 23,549 local government units.
The NBN
project, had it not been shelved, would have provided
services to all public organizations like schools,
hospitals and police stations, added ZTE, China’s only
telecommunication supplier listed in the Hong Kong and
Shen Zhen stocks exchanges.
“Our
unsullied track record speaks for itself. We have been
serving more than 500 telecommunication operators in
over 120 countries. We have completed and are in the
process of completing billions of dollars worth of
telecommunication projects worldwide.”
“In all
of these, our only misgiving—aside from the undeserved
attacks on ZTE—is that the NBN project of the Philippine
government… had to be sacrificed before the altar of
political intrigue,” said the Chinese firm. |
