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By Luis Leoncio Port stakeholders said it would be prudent for the Philippine Ports Authority (PPA) to withhold action on the 37.45-percent tariff-increase petition of the Manila North Harbour Philippines Inc. (MNHPI) until President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has appointed a full complement of officials of the regulatory body.

By Jerry Maglunog and Luis Leoncio  NOT too fast, the newly formed Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) has admonished the three telecommunication giants involved in a P70-billion deal, after they claimed the transaction was “deemed approved” and that all that was needed was for them to file a notice. 

By Luis Leoncio  President-elect Duterte is expected to bring in a “populist” administration whose national budget will be targeted for massive infrastructure spending, and which will aim to convert the economy from being consumption-driven to one that is led by exports and investments to generate jobs. 

Big port stakeholders are protesting the “indecent haste” at which the Bureau of Customs (BOC) sought the approval of the draft implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of the Customs Modernization and Tariff Act (CMTA).

An expert on cybercrime has expressed fears the criminals behind the $81-million cyberheist of the Bangladesh Bank may never be found, as the US government, through its Congress, started its own probe into the daring theft from the Federal Reserve in New York.

By Luis Leoncio Consumers remain gloomy as pessimists continue to dominate in the quarterly consumer expectation survey of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), with the confidence index (CI) for the second quarter sinking to a negative 6.4 percent from negative 5.7 percent in the first quarter. 

By Luis Leoncio  Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings said the low income level in the Philippines, owing to high unemployment (6. 5 percent) and underemployment (21 percent), remains a key constraint to its economic resilience despite a prosperous economy. 

Nine of the Philippines’s biggest firms have made it to Forbes’s biggest 2,000 companies in the world in terms of market capitalization. 

By Riza Lozada  Vicious competition is preventing the Philippines’s two major telecommunications firms from interconnecting their broadband networks, which has proved to be a major hindrance to improving Internet connection in the country, Oxford Business Group (OBG) has confirmed.

By Jerry Maglunog  In terms of economic management, President Aquino was a dismal failure despite leaving at least P160-billion savings in the National Treasury, according to former Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno.