Gov’t wants to ensure success of PPP projects
MANILA, Philippines—The Department of Interior and Local Government will come out with policies to reconcile local with national government laws and regulations to make it easier for participants in the government’s public-private partnership(PPP) program to do business in the country.
At a press conference on Friday, Local Government Secretary Jesse Robredo said some new policies would have to be formulated to ensure that local-government laws would not clash with those of the national government.
“We will set policies to hurdle that. We need to remove the conflict between national and local laws,” he said.
He cited as an example South Cotabato’s law banning open-pit mining, which was “even more strict than the national law.”
RA 7942, or the Philippine Mining Act of 1995, aims to harness the full growth potential of the mining industry to make it serve as one of the key catalysts for the growth of the country.
Mining has also been named by the national government as one of the priority sectors for development.
The provincial government of South Cotabato, however, signed into law a local environment code that banned open-pit mining in the province.
Another example, he said, was the claim of independent power producers that they were exempted from real property taxes by virtue of their build-operate-transfer agreements with the state-owned National Power Corp.
Local government units, however, continued to run after IPPs, threatening not to issue business permits or even take over the operations of power-generation facilities if they did not pay their taxes.
The Supreme Court had earlier ruled that since such facilities were owned by the private sector, owners should be liable for real-property taxes. Plant owners, on the other hand, cried foul since they did not include such taxes into their computations when they were just starting their business, on the assumption that these levies would be shouldered by Napocor.
Robredo said such cases of conflict should be resolved and not replicated in the case of the PPP projects that the government was offering to private investors.
Some amendments to the Local Government Code, he added, would have to be made, particularly in the area of incentives provision.
“There has to be a link between the national laws and those of different LGUs,” he said, citing the need to create local development councils that would “localize” PPP projects by way of coming out with consistent taxes, regulations and rules on the issuance of permits and clearances.
Local investment officers should also have their counterparts in the DILG, to ensure rapport between PPP project proponents and LGUs, he added.
No comments:
Post a Comment