COCKTALES | LTFRB to summon local Uber over colorum charge

InterAksyon.com means BUSINESS

Uber Philippines will be summoned by the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board for its "colorum" operations upon the complaint of the local taxi industry.

This information came from no less than the LFTRB chairman Winston Ginez during a dinner with Philippine Star editors Wednesday night.

"We needed someone to file a complaint first," Ginez said.

The transport regulatory chief, at the same meeting, said the Philippine National Taxi Operators Association had admitted to experiencing a shortfall of drivers on account of the income-crippling gridlock that now daily besets Metro Manila.

Uber is a transportation network in San Francisco, California that makes mobile apps that connect passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire and ridesharing services. The company arranges pickups in over 110 cities around the world, including Manila, wherein cars are reserved by sending a text message or by using a mobile app.

In the Philippines, Uber's service has been limited to the Makati and Ortigas corridor, according to Ginez.

The move in Manila to place Uber under the regulatory framework comes amid Berlin voting this week, following Hamburg, to ban the app-enabled taxi service for failing to provide adequate insurance for drivers and their passengers and for hiring uncertificated drivers.

Araneta loan mess has banks scrambling for Country Club cover

Three banks are scrambling for cover in the widening loan mess attributed to ex-banker and Mike Arroyo cousin, Benito Ramon "Bomboy" Araneta.

According to sources who have had dealings with Araneta, the Bank of the Philippine Islands, Philippine Veterans Bank and Real Bank, the thrift bank of developer Jose Acuzar, had extended an undetermined millions of loans to the former BPI director ostensibly for the development of The Country Club, the country's most exclusive golf course.

Araneta used an undetermined number club shares and the adjoining subdivision lots in Canlubang as collateral to obtain loans from the three banks, with one account claiming that the same underlying assets had been pledged more than once for the multiple borrowings.

Country Club chairman and president Enrique Razon Jr. declined to comment on the banks' claims against Araneta, except to say that "we have nothing to do with Bomboy whatsoever."

Charged with non-bailable syndicated/public funds estafa for having borrowed P230 million from LBC Bank using fake collaterals, Araneta, now detained in Camp Crame, is asking the Makati Regional Trial Court that he be granted bail.

Judge Maximo De Leon had set a hearing Friday afternoon for the bail motion over the objections of the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp., which had taken over the collapsed LBC Bank.

Araneta is apparently banking on the Department of Justice having dropped his three other co-defendants, leaving him and the now fugitive former LBC Bank president Maria Eliza Berenguer, short of the minimum number of five confederates to qualify for a syndicate.

Going back to The Country Club, none of the three banks, according to the grapevine, have so far served notice to the club management seeking to transfer the memberships from Araneta or any of his companies.

The club is limited to 400 members, who each fork out a minimum of P15,000 a month in dues, as against the Manila Golf's P13,440.

Kapitan's reversal complicates SMC relations

The Court of Appeals has dealt taipan Lucio Tan another hangover of a reversal that strikes at his honorary title, kapitan.

Ginebra Kapitan, the flagship gin of Tan's Tanduay Distillers, has been deemed a trademark copycat by the appellate court, which decided that the word ginebra, Spanish for gin, has become historically associated with Ginebra San Miguel of the competing San Miguel Corp. 

In a departure from established jurisprudence, appellate justices Isaias Dicdican, Michael Elbinias and Victoria Isabel Paredes proceeded to hear and decided last month the infringement complaint filed by San Miguel Corp. subsidiary Ginebra San Miguel rather than consolidate the case with another one -- involving the manufacture, distribution and sale of Ginebra Kapitan -- pending before a different division.

In any case, the same three justices except for Elbinias at almost the same time last year issued a similar order stopping the production, distribution and sale of Ginebra Kapitan on similar ground.

Last month's decision by the Dicdican division also reversed the Intellectual Property Office's approval of Ginebra Kapitan's registration.

The taipan and San Miguel are in the midst of negotiations to cut short their two-year partnership in Philippine Airlines, with the Lucio Tan Group offering to buy back the 49-percent stake of San Miguel in the flag carrier.

Money-go-round

o Resort developer Jose Marcel Panlilio has gone on record to accuse Amable Aguiluz V of AMA Colleges of having provided muscle and lawyers to assist the counter-claimants to Panlilio's Friday's Boracay resort property.

o Unhappiness has set in among the senior officers of a major bank after the bank's new president started hiring a number of underemployed investment bankers to surround himself.

E-mail: cocktales_tv5@yahoo.com