INVESTORS need not worry about contracts and commitments being honored, a Cabinet member said on Friday, amid fears attached to the recent announcements of President Duterte of an economic pivot toward China from the United States.
Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Rodolfo A. Salalima said on Friday his office will execute contracts signed by the government, whether local or international, based on the existing laws of the Philippines.
“All business investments, contracts and commitments, local and international, in the country and for our country, will be honored by the Philippine government, consistent with the nonimpairment and due process clauses in the Philippine Constitution and existing laws of the land,” he said.
He made this statement to assure investors that the Philippine government is committed to deals that it signed in the past, while echoing Mr. Duterte’s vow during Cabinet meetings.
“This pledge has been made by the President often during our meetings. The President is sincere on this pronouncement and he will be true to his words,” Salalima said.
Since August, when Mr. Duterte started waging a word war of sort against US President Barack Obama and the European Union, stock prices and the peso-dollar exchange rates have been declining. Debt watcher Moody’s warned last week that political risks in the Philippines “have become less predictable.”
Sources said there are a few US-based companies that have already started folding down their operations in the Philippines because of the rhetoric of the “colorful” Filipino president. Some of these corporations are business-processing outsourcing providers.
The BusinessMirror tried to get more information from Salalima, but he was unavailable as of this writing.
The newly formed government department is an offshoot of the Department of Science and Technology-Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Office, which has numerous contracts with telco operators and Internet service providers.
Under the law, the department primary policy includes planning, coordinating, implementing, and administrative entity of the Executive branch of the government that will plan, develop and promote the national ICT development agenda.
It is tasked to formulate, recommend and implement national policies, plans, programs and guidelines that will promote the development and use of ICT with due consideration to the advantages of convergence and emerging technologies.
Salalima has said that the government will pursue a P200-billion national broadband network, which will include a mixture of several Internet connectivity technologies such as fixed line and mobile data, among others.
The national backbone will be included in the National Broadband Plan, which will analyze existing and planned government and private-sector deployment, and address supply-and-demand gaps by recommending policy and nonpolicy-related actions.
The plan will also provide detailed physical targets and strategies to effect nationwide broadband deployment and widespread use.
Currently, the Philippines is one of the few countries in the region wherein the government has yet to fully engage in investing in telco infrastructure.
Neighboring countries in the Asean have already started to implement national broadband plans, earmarking billions of dollars to develop a government-owned backbone for the information superhighway.
In Thailand, for example, the government has invested $114 million to improve the Internet service or availability. The fund is part of Bangkok’s economic policy.
The Vietnamese government, on the other hand, owns two of the three largest telecommunications companies in Ho Chi Minh City. Investments mainly come from the government.
Malaysia has now spent a total of $4.5 billion over a 10-year period to lay fiber-optic lines to every home in the country’s urban area.
Other developing and developed economies are investing billions of dollars to improve Internet access in their countries.
He said his office will be open in pursuing deals with the private sector to hasten the development of the digital economy in the Philippines.