Agriculture Secretary Arthur C. Yap said he was rushing the privatization of the 120-hectare Food Terminals Inc. complex in Taguig City as the state-run Government Service Insurance System had offered P7 billion for the property.
On the sidelines of the Philippine Food Processors & Exporters Organization Inc. exhibit last week, Yap said Finance Secretary Margarito Teves had assured him that he would order the Privatization Management Office to immediately work on the FTI privatization.
“We want to sell [FTI] immediately and break it up into smaller centers for producers, but the economic managers instructed us to hold a bidding first,” Yap said.
Another finance official said the government would initially sell 70 hectares of the 120-hectare property in Taguig City.
The 70 hectares of the FTI property, considered to be the next “The Fort,” were identified to house businesses whose lease contracts will expire in less than a year. The rest are either housing tenants with long-term lease contracts or occupied by informal settlers, according to the Department of Finance.
The entire FTI property, earlier valued by the DOF at P15 billion, was identified as one of the assets to be privatized this year to help beef up government revenues. The government has set a target of generating as much as P30 billion this year from privatization of its various assets.
However, problems hounding some parcels of the property were seen to delay the planned sale, prompting the DOF to sell the portion of the land without legal problems.
“It is better that the area is cleared before the government sells a property to easily attract buyers,” Finance Undersecretary Crisanta Legaspi said Friday.
Read the rest of the story from Inquirer.net’s Property Guide