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By Riza Lozada  Budget watchdogs and anti-pork advocates have banded together and asked the Supreme Court (SC) to remove parts of the 2015 budget law that allowed President Aquino to have almost unlimited discretionary funds through the juggling of budgetary items. 

By Luis Leoncio  All eyes will be on the Philippine National Police (PNP) Highway Patrol Group (HPG) starting Monday as it carries out its new mandate: to try solving Metro Manila’s monstrous traffic problem. 

If all goes well, the bill lowering individual and corporate income-tax rates is scheduled for plenary deliberations by the House of Representatives this week, following its approval on first reading by the House Committee on Appropriations, Marikina City Rep. Romero Quimbo, chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means and one of the authors of the measure, said. 

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Philippines, despite being critical drivers of growth and employment, have the least access to bank financing among the major economies in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), according to a joint report of the British financial advisory firm Deloitte and the global credit card firm Visa. 

By Luis Leoncio  Legislators are racing against time to pass bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives seeking to increase tax exemptions on the salaries of Filipino workers, as the final legislative sessions under the Aquino administration wind down. 

In the face of the consistent failure of the Aquino administration to address the country’s electric-power problem that has spawned a host of other economic ills, notably the high prices of basic goods, a fierce advocate of the use of nuclear energy has strongly urged the activation of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP), which was mothballed in the early …

Foreign trade groups in the Philippines, noting that technology has become a major source of economic output in the country, has strongly urged the House of Representatives to pass a bill creating a Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) before the end of the current session of Congress. 

For the eighth consecutive year, property, retail and banking tycoon Henry Sy, whose conglomerate owns the chain of SM Supermalls in the Philippines and China, has remained the country’s richest, with his net worth up $1.7 billion from last year to $14.4 billion. 

By Luis Leoncio  Among the monumental missed opportunities of the Aquino administration was the proposed Freedom of Information (FOI) Act that, according to an influential business group, would have elevated transparency in the government to an irreversible level and, thus, drew in bigger investments to the country. 

By Riza Lozada  Aside from the automatically appropriated Internal Revenue Allotments (IRA), a total of P28 billion in lump sums, or what used to be commonly referred to as the pork barrel fund, is set to be released to local government units (LGUs), just nine months before next year’s elections.