Poor reporting on CPVDC

Letter to the Editor, SunStar Cebu, 7 November 2008:


The Editor-in-Chief
SunStar Daily
Cebu City

Dear Editor:

It is inconceivable, considering the comprehensive (and I should say better) reporting SunStar did in the 1990s on the Cebu Property Ventures and Development Corporation (CPVDC) deal, that your present crop of reporters would get it totally wrong on the simple matter of when the CPVDC was founded.

In your report today, you failed to state that CPVDC was founded in 1990. Googling “CPVDC” would have gotten you that information. The Philippine Stock Exchange website, as well as a dozen other investment websites, would have yielded it.

Worse, your reporter mentioned that the CPVDC started commercial operations in 1995, which -- insofar as when the joint venture with between the Province of Cebu and the Ayala group was concerned -- is totally irrelevant. Commercial operations may have begun in 1995, but this was because it took 5 years to build the infrastructure. And extremely misleading, for there is a crucial difference here: In 1990, the governor was Lito Osmena; in 1995, it was Pablo Garcia.

The omission (whether inadvertent or deliberate) sweeps under the rug the interesting, and highly controversial, history of the CPVDC, which SunStar with its better crop of editors and reporters covered with journalistic zeal, and a lot of color:

1. The exciting bidding process which led to the historic (in terms of magnitude of price) deal with the Ayala group. This also belies the claim, in the report, that the deal did not undergo public bidding.
2. The investigations on the deal instigated by then Governor Tingting de la Serna when he assumed office in 1992. Your past issues would have shown how Gov. de la Serna had already raised the same issues Mayor Tomas Osmena is now raising.
3. The controversy that arose when Governor Pabling Garcia, sometime in 1996, sold-- at a premium --- a substantial chunk of the Province’s CPVDC shares to Cebu Holdings Inc. (CHI). He turned out to be right, as this was right before the Asian financial crisis, and the markets crashed, and the price of CPVC shares plummeted.

We realize that journalism is literature in a hurry. But this should not be an excuse for laziness. We should also realize that journalism is also history, written on a daily basis. Thus, we should take care that what we write serves history by providing its crucial and indispensable elements: accuracy, perspective, continuity.

We hope you will publish this letter, in the interest of perspective.

Yours sincerely,


Pablo John Garcia

P.S. (and you don’t have to publish this part) - It is beyond me why Linette could have missed this. Last night, she texted my wife, asking for precisely this information, and Karen told her about the CPVDC’s founding in 1990, and pointed her to past reporting by SunStar.