In fact, coal production has doubled locally from 1.5 million tons to three million tons. With global prices on the rise due to the reduction of exports from traditional exporters like China, the future looks rosy for this once derided fossil fuel.

But all the talk about developing the local coal industry into a boom gets thrown into a damper if you consider what has just happened in a recent bidding for the stuff that was conducted by state-run National Power Corp. (Napocor). Local power generation is heavily dependent on coal, which powers more than a fourth of all our generating capacity.

Surprisingly, with all our much touted reserves that can be used for power generation, we have to import much of that and now, it seems, from very questionable sources at that.

In a letter dated February 12, 2008 Napocor invited Transpacific Consolidated Resources Inc. (TCRI) and its partner, PT Marsitero Marloan, to participate in a bidding for the supply of coal worth P320 million for use in its Pagbilao plant. This in itself was highly questionable since TCRI is one of those new entities in the coal universe having just been incorporated less than four months before. But that did not matter at all to the Napocor as it eventually awarded the contract to TCRI.

Not only that. Napocor eventually wound up awarding the newcomer a grand total of P956.4 million in contracted coal deliveries. These consist of three 65,000-ton shipments of coal at US$109.50 per ton inclusive of freight costs.

It is amazing how the geniuses behind this bidding did the math. You start out with a P320 million contract and you end up awarding it to a company with an authorized capital stock of P1 million to which only a quarter is actually subscribed and a quarter of that quarter is actually paid up.

That is a grand total of P62,500 in actual cash outlay. I do not know about those guys from Napocor but I have seen road side fruit stalls with more inventories than that. That is probably why its corporate papers identify it as a coal trading company or a mere broker or middleman who has to get its supplies from somebody else.

I cannot imagine how the shareholders of TCRI can come up with the required bonds and bank guarantees to handle the deal they were handed by the Napocor. It apparently does not even have a real business address having cited a room at the Danara Hotel as its office location only to have the veracity of that claim denied by the hotel management. This was even subsequently changed in the notice of award in the notice of award that TCRI received to an office at the Atlanta Centre in Annapolis St., San Juan.

TCRI does maintain a bank account in Cebu City under the Peninsula Rural Bank. Yes, it is a rural bank and that is a very strong indictment against the financial and technical capacity of TCRI to deliver on the contract. And yet, it still won the bidding and the contract value was more than tripled by the Napocor.

That leaves just one question: Is TRCI just a very lucky company to have the "good fortune" of winning an almost billion-peso supply contract from the government or is it fronting for someone or something very high up and influential? It very well could be in light of the facts emerging about TRCI.