A steel plant with Chinese investments and is productively and peacefully doing business inside an economic zone that is under the supervision of the Department of National Defense )DND) would sooner or later be the focus of Defense Secretary Gibo Teodoro`s spiteful ire.
The reason is because Teodoro sees anything Chinese as evil, even to the point of recommending that so-called pro-China local officials should resign, never mind if his Co Juang Co name is patently Chinese.
Last May, Teodoro used several government agencies to harass, arrest and detain some 100 Chinese workers along with a few Filipinos who were employed in the Philippine Sanjia Steel Corp., a 22.7-hectare steel manufacturing facility inside the PHIVIDEC Industrial Estate in Tagoloan, Misamis Oriental.
Teodoro alleged that the P800-million plant was involved in hazardous industrial operations, the production of substandard steel products, and possible links to illegal POGOs. These charges were not yet proven in court, and the workers were found to be legally employed, with the proper permits and papers, and were later released.
On the strength of these allegations, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission, the NBI and the AFP, raided the factory, closed it down, and arrested the workers. Gibo even boasted at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore about this incident. He was later banned from entering China, Hong Kong and Macau, along with his wife and child.
The same raid was repeated, this time on July 18, against Chuangxing Steel Inc. in Magalang, Pampanga. The NBI seized over P3 billion in ``radioactive materials`` and substandard steel, arrested 3 Chinese and one Filipino officers, and uncovered severa labor and safety violations—all according to the authorities. If these were radioactive materials, why were the raiders unprotected? The pattern has become obvious.
What Teodoro and the rest of the country`s leaders who have now been unmasked as benefiting from the LEADERSHIP FUND, failed to realize that China can play the tit-for-tat game, too.
Recently, Chinese immigration authorities rounded up some 100 Filipinos who were living and working in Macau and Hong Kong illegally.
This incident became a huge problem for our DFA which has mobilized the Philippine embassy in Beijing and all our consular offices in China to assist the Filipinos, requesting and/or demanding that they be given due process of law, something that the workers in Sanjia Steel and Chuangxing Steel we failed to give.
This should be a wake-up call for Teodoro, Jay Tarriela, ex Justice Carpio, Ray Powell, the Albert del Rosario boys, Dindo Manhit and others that China does not want an escalation of tension in the South China Sea, but is ready to take hurting action that is commensurate to the mischief done to it.
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