By Diego Morra
Business columnists and uncritical business reporters, and there are about a dime a dozen of them, have been glorifying the full takeover of the operations of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) in September, gushing over the new escalators, elevators, walkalators and the clean toilets and bidets and lauding Ramon Ang for promising to spend billions to make the airport world-class. They should stop spouting crap.
This cheapskate Ang is not digging into his pocket to pay those necessary expenses, as the first thing he did at the NAIA was to impose skyrocketing fees for passenger services without the benefit of study and hearings to explain why those fees were necessary. To be spared of due process, the Ramon Ang concession agreement exempted the passenger service charges (PSC)from government control while Ramon Ang ginned up media talk about the 82.16% revenue share of the state. It sucks since the biggest revenue stream is the PSC. Despite his boast, Ang has failed to complete his MRT-7 project and he even has the temerity to complain about right of way (ROW issues. This is pure bunk. Infrastructure projects have to contend with ROW issues even if the state expropriates the land for his, and his principals,’ benefit. The last time we checked, Ramon Ang is not the majority owner of the land.
What Ramon Ang did to the people of Taliptip, Bulakan, Bulacan, site of his poldered land that he is transforming into the New Manila International Airport within the San Miguel Corp. (SMC) fiefdom along with a racetrack for his Ferraris and other status symbols that do not have any impact on the lives of the fishermen and farmers in the town who were evicted in exchange for P250,000 per lot, never mind if the people there needed to farm and fish. In fact, Ang’s takeover should have been declared illegal for violating the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) but give it to the mindless Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. regime that protects, defends and promotes the interests of billionaires like Ang and that guy lurking in the shadows, Inigo Zobel.
The indigenous people of Bugsuk Island in Palawan were also recently double-crossed when the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) declared their land, earlier set aside for distribution under CARP, was suddenly declared unsuitable for agriculture but best for a bogus ecotourism venture of Ramon Ang. The island’s airstrip will host environmental advocates from the most destructive mining companies that promote the conundrum called “sustainable mining,” as ores are crops or vegetables. The indigenous people of Bugsuk are still fighting, like those in the 40,000-hectare fiefdom of Marcos cronies in Busuanga, Palawan.
In April 2025, a battalion of lawyers led by distinguished Lyceum Law Dean Sol Derequito Mawis and former Ateneo School of Government Dean Tony La Vina petitioned the Supreme Court (SC) to look into the unconstitutional NAIA deal that practically delivered all airport services on a silver platter to Ang. The same group, now reinforced by hundreds of petitioners, pleaded with the better angels of the High Tribunal’s nature to rule against Ang and make the law walk on its feet and not on its head. Central to their argument is the fact that the entire process of rescinding the qualification of at least two potential NAIA operators showed they got short shrift. Yet, it appears that Ang has some sort of entitlement even during the Rodrigo Duterte administration, when he started forming his Bulakan, Bulacan kingdom.
On March 25, 2024, Maricar Piedad, a researcher for the IBON Foundation, wrote “NAIA PPP project: Sky-high profits for Ramon Ang,” and analyzed why the deal should be scrapped in the national interest. SMC, as a junior partner in consortium, was declared to be the winner of the P170.6-billion NAIA rehabilitation and management award. The announcement came as travelers complained of bedbugs crawling out of airport chairs and rats staring at passengers. This is akin to the water crisis conveniently declared in 1995 on the eve of the privatization of water services. In 2023, NAIA handled 45.4 million passengers on 279,953 flights, not bad for Asia’s fourth worst airport.
Two groups that submitted unsolicited proposals for NAIA rehabilitation during the Duterte regime were actually granted Original Proponent Status (OPS). They are the NAIA Consortium and Megawide Construction Corp. with its partner India-based GMR Infrastructure Ltd. However, the OPS of both consortia were revoked as negotiations with the government collapsed. Unfazed by the rejection, the Manila International Airport Consortium (MIAC), formerly the NAIA Consortium minus the Manny Pangilinan-led Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC), took another shot at the project, offering a P267-billion unsolicited proposal in 2023, but the Marcos Jr. government again junked it. Malacanang and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) then crafted a P170.6-billion solicited Public-Private Partnership (PPP) project for a 15-year concession period. The then National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Board headed by the President approved the new NAIA rehabilitation project in just 47 days, which Piedad described as the fastest PPP approval in the country’s history.
On February 16, the SMC-SAP Consortium was declared the winner after offering the highest proposed government revenue share at 82.16%, excluding the Passenger Service Charges (PSC); the next highest bid was only around a 33% revenue share. The SMC-SAP Consortium is composed of Ramon Ang’s SMC, RMM Asian Logistics, Inc., RLW Aviation Development Inc., and Incheon International Airport Corp. Questions have been raised against RMM and RLW in which SMC had stakes. SMC now controls expressways in and out of NAIA. SMC should have been immediately kicked out of the NAIA contract since it controls the NMIA project in Bulacan. RMM and RLW only had a paid-up capital of only P6.3 million and both were incorporated at the same time and could be Ang’s shell corporations. RMM owner, Raymond Miller Moreno, was the ex-president of Liberty Telecoms that SMC used to control. He was charged by the US government with several cases, including tax evasion in 1987. RLW, is reportedly owned by Robert Lee Wong. Incheon International Airport Corp., was charged by the South Korean government with 26 cases of tax evasion totaling $155.8 million in 2014. So there you have it, Ang’s partners have been machinegunned with criminal cases in various countries.
