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Of late, Mayor Rody Duterte, asked Congress to be allowed to right-size the bureaucracy. Some, he said, have overlapping functions, others have redundant justifications, and, still, many others are simply top heavy for their mandates. Indeed, many agencies are inappropriately …

Accreditation is the first issue one has to get acquainted with when planning to deal with the customs bureau. Unless your firm is accredited, your importation documents will not be processed. You have to get accreditation, otherwise your importation will …

A group of port stakeholders has exposed the highly questionable multimillion-peso per container insurance collection by the Association of International Shipping Lines Inc. (AISL) and its attendant inflationary effect on the Philippine economy. Primarily, who is AISL? Based on Internet verification, …

Imposition of multimillion-peso deposit ANOTHER serious problem port stakeholders encounter is the highly questionable imposition by international shipping lines of multimillion-peso deposits on containers and the very slow processes of getting a refund for such deposits. With regard to this …

Lack of regulatory power to oversee foreign shipping lines WITH the advent of the world trade, foreign commercial vessels bringing in and taking out cargoes worth billions of pesos for the market are not paying enough taxes and have subjected …

How safe are our country’s ports, airports, and freeports? “There are many ways to fight terrorism—but only one way to destroy it and that is to do so.” This was the statement of Philippine Ambassador Teddy Locsin Jr. at the …

A friend from Down Under called me asking what benchmarking means. Obviously, he was watching the legislative inquiries in both chambers of Congress. I am sure there is no such animal among the kangaroos and koalas even in their outbacks. …

WITH 7,107 islands and a land area of more than 300,000 square kilometers, the Philippines lies at the center of the globe, 6 to 18 degrees above the equator, between the Pacific Ocean and the West Philippine Sea (South China …

Philippine Star headlined, “Asean vows to fight drug menace, terrorism [8/9/17]. It reads: “Fighting the drug menace and terrorism with greater vigor highlighted the declaration of commitment by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at the end of its …

WHILE there’s a West Philippine Sea (WPS), how come there are no equivalents to the east, north and south of the Philippines? Did our policy makers in government overlook this? I asked these question because it’s in the east, north …